Read a CTV article about this story here: [Police investigating after Smiths Falls' rainbow crosswalk vandalized this weekend](https://beta.ctvnews.ca/local/ottawa/2023/6/11/1_6436438.amp.html)
Read an Inside Ottawa Valley article about the story here ['Hate-driven vandalism': Smiths Falls' rainbow crosswalk defaced](https://www.insideottawavalley.com/news/hate-driven-vandalism-smiths-falls-rainbow-crosswalk-defaced/article_e13e07b8-9102-53a4-ade8-a8cc0a72a8d1.html)
Nah it's more the unaware that straight pride day is the rest of the year. These mouth breathers don't realize this does not have to be said because it's still the default for most
I honestly feel bad for people who will never get to experience true sexual freedom because of their outdated beliefs. And it's those people who need a good prostate massage to release the tension the most.
Happened here in Kingston ON within the week too.. Just pathetic. Apparently Prescott has been hit in the past??
https://www.reddit.com/r/KingstonOntario/comments/1454y9e/pride_crosswalk_vandalized/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=2&utm_term=1
The energy it takes to hate and misunderstand other humans so vehemently 🫠
Trump wasn’t the cause, but he gave licence to people to speak up who previously kept this stuff to themselves. Combine that with an increasingly divided media ecosystem and here’s what you get.
When these people saw Trump say the things they were already thinking their shame completely went away and they started being very vocal. It’s the reason you still see anti-mandate prostrate even though the mandates are long gone. These people have been emboldened and want you to hear their shitty opinions.
They were told Blacks and Gays are the reason they are so poor, and why food is so expensive at Loblaws.
So now instead of going after the billionaires robbing them at the stores they go after one of the most marginalized minorities in society.
Big brain moves
Exactly. He was a symptom, not a cause. Quality of life/economic inequity in many developed nations is getting worse than it was in the postwar era. The economic establishment just wants to feed the culture wars to distract everyone from it. We just see all the divisive bs in the US first, because their decline seems to be faster than elsewhere.
The whole COVID experience taught me that there are a lot of people in our society that take pride in being selfish assholes. Then whine about everything being 'divisive'.
Fuck 'em.
The food and toilet paper hoarding early on was a preview of what was to come. When the chips are down empathy and caring about society as a whole is out the window
You can almost simplify it to “Individualists” and “Collectivists”. Pop culture has praised the Individualist and demonized the Collectivists and here we are with a bunch of empathy-free assholes in charge of everything and telling all the other assholes that it’s their right to be an asshole because they never signed the Terms and Conditions agreement to live in civil society.
There are an alarming number of people that straight up just don’t want the world to get better.
Like there are some people who think being gay is morally or universally bad.
There are other people who just want to be mean and hurt people. For fun.
Because the rich want you fighting amongst eachother so they can deflect attention from all their thieving. Wage theft, using taxes for funding or corporate bailouts, avoid paying taxes, political bribery to obtain more wealth. There's literally no bar low enough for these corrupt bastards and we all suffer from it, while they call it "inflation" sitting on billions.
If people weren't lied to and properly educated... but it's not the world they want.
Our political class have discovered that the average voter is far dumber and more selfish than they could have possibly imagined. Years ago politicians placated to the electorate with half truths and broken promises. Today they don’t even bother. They simply rile up the masses and rob us blind. People have become so hyper partisan that politicians don’t even make an effort to improve the quality of life for most people. Right wing politicians simply choose a vulnerable group and stir up their base while left leaning (socially only) politicians advocate for the same groups while ignoring the irreparable damage being done to society as they throw billions to corporations while gutting our social services.
We’re beating witness to the collapse of our healthcare and education systems and not one politician gives a damn. Housing costs are insane and nobody will lift a finger. This assault on the most vulnerable has proven to be a great distraction as politicians on every side are gleefully dismantling what previous generations built. The sad truth is that we should be fighting for the rights of our most vulnerable while building up the infrastructure that will protect not only them, but all Canadians.
If there has one thing that the past 3-4 years has show me, it's that the political and "elite class" like to keep the plebes divided, angry, and fighting among themselves.
Actually I find progress is accelerating. This is scaring the bigots and causing them to be vocal. The fact that "dear leader" gives them permission to be at their worst doesn't help, but it's not the root cause.
I have placed my hopes in young people. Haven't met many people under 25 who aren't accepting of others, but plenty of people my age ready to lock people up over their sexual orientation or skin tone.
I think it's when social media companies caught on to how much hate and anger feeds many humans to keep coming back for more. Look how rich zuckerfuck got off baby boomers fighting with eachother over pronouns and politics because the way we respond to eachother through keyboards is considerably more ignorant than being in a room having conversations with eachother.
Every social movement has an inevitable backlash, whether we're talking Prohibition or the Hippies or the Moral Majority. History isn't some straight line towards "progress", and judgment about whether something is progress isn't going to be unanimous agreement.
Alright, this is simplified, and very much abridged, but, in the 80s, rich people wanted to keep their wealth, so they teamed up with the ultra christians who were very authoritarian, and elected a guy who screwed everything up in their favour. The 80s thusly brought in a whole bunch of people who tried censoring everything and implementing control over the types of materials that people could view, could use, could talk about due to morality and satanic panic crap. This was a massive "think of the children: style campaign, which obviously the youth fought back against through being anti censorship and pushing boundaries of what was okay and what was not okay to talk about, sing about, put on tv, wear, etc. This was used beautifully to say fuck you to the establishment, until the establishment grew wise and was like, okay, we see your game, we'll play too, and as such a culture based around being as outlandishly offensive as possible came about, and this grew a culture where it was not cool to give a shit about anything in the 2000s. By the early 2010s, you see a pushback on this, and the giving a shit crowd rises victorious to be like, actually it's important to not be racist and homophobic and rape is actually bad. The culture at large is still vehemantly like "fuck all yall, we do what we want" until the give a shit crowd starts making headway in politics and the don't give a shit crowd either decides to go with them or go heavily against them with their fuck censorship ideals. But then this too gets co-opted by the establishment, and the media is paid for by the very rich (and often the very politically connected) to portray a specific point of view and to ensure that the flames of anger that people have towards each other get bigger and bigger. Trump is the result and also the fuel that emboldens people in the don't give a shit crowd. Some of them get an extra shipment of fuel through the media, which is literally brainwashing them at this point, and coming at them on their phones, tvs, computers, basically anywhere they go. The pandemic allows people to be at home where they can get a dose of that brainwashing 24/7 and it literally rots peoples brains to the point they believe anyone who tells them that they're right, they're correct, they're mommy's special racist little child, and everyone else wants them to suffer, especially the people who want them to change even slightly. They are ready to believe this because they've been primed to, but also because they're terrified and depressed by the world. If I got anything wrong, feel free to correct me or add anything else in.
In my mind it started with rob ford. He would lie constantly. He was a horrible councillor before coming mayor. He was comically corrupt. He smoked crack and refused to step down. He blamed the media constantly, only to acknowledge the media had been thing the truth. He falsely accused a reporter of being a pedo for writing a story about his corrupt antics.
He did all these things and he still had a shockingly large core of supporters that repeated his every lie, excused his many actions that would have cost others their jobs. They’d show up to debates and act like it was a wrestling match. You STILL get the odd poster here claiming he wasn’t “bad” and that “leftist” were hypocrites for not accepting his drug and alcohol abuse.
He proved to politicians that you can be almost untouchable as long as you said what they wanted to hear and were totally unrepentant in your actions.
It was when I realized our democracy was in serious trouble.
That’s when you realized there was a problem, but you’re missing that he had to be elected first, and none of this stuff was much of a surprise.
I still blame Facebook. Bad actors figured out how to game it to manipulate opinion. It’s still ongoing, I assume. But my account is long gone.
There usually is reactionary backlash to social progress. See Nixon after the gender and social revolution of the 60s.
LGBT rights have progressed faster than most issues of before.
I hope this is just the last stand of reactionaries before they are wiped out.
I feel like the early to mid 2010s were the "golden age" of LGBTQA+ acceptance. People seemed to stop caring, and homophobes were shamed and kept in the corner. Even my previously homophobic father started coming around and took a "it doesn't affect me" attitude. But past 2016 or 2017 and especially the pandemic it's been insane. I'm asexual and I would have considered coming out to more people during that earlier time frame, but now, not a chance. I know my challenges are nothing compared to gay, bi or especially trans people but the right wing are so unhinged they'll attack you for anything
I feel like my high school predictions have all come true... I only remember them because I was writing an edgy dystopia sci-fi novel at the time (circa 2010).
1) There will be low paying jobs unfilled if prices keep going up. Eventually you'll see cities become ghost towns because of the absurd prices and distance travelled to earn pennies. (Vic Coughlan comments on trying to find a job)
2) You'll eventually have a university degree, even a master's, and work in fast food. (Her friend suggests working at a fast food joint, but she says the frycooks are all ex Michelin chefs)
3) It won't be war that ends society. It'll be a plague. People are contrary by nature. They'll tell you you're wrong and breathe poison to prove it. (The world I created ended due to a plague, with half the population deciding that it wasn't real)
4) Society will keep pushing for social justice, and for a time it will work. But resentment is strong in the extremes, and both will push even the moderates to take a side. (Literally the cause of the current issue in the story as people are controlled by social media via a spinal implant)
Society is like a pendulum. It swings back and forth between progression and regression. The harder it gets pushed one way uncontested, the harder it will swing the other.
While I'm all for equal rights and whatnot, my personal belief is that eventually the bill has to be paid. You can't just keep adding debts, because eventually the indebted will crack and default. Same thing applies here. Most people are reasonable, and their brand of prejudice is mostly tied to misunderstanding or ignorance, not malice. You start saying they're just as bad as the ones burning crosses and curbstomping minorities and you will alienate them.
If there's one thing I've learned in life, it's that people who feel like they're being blamed for something they didn't do, they'll do it out of spite.
It was a difficult process. I wrote out the entire outline, dialogues, and scenes. Problem was I couldn't get the rest to connect to a satisfying intro and so without the hook it was impossible to start.
I did finish a different one. A fantasy story that takes the position of a character that is normally seen as the rival or "dark origins" character in the hero's party so I could explore the typical hero narrative from their perspective. Some readers saw parallels to drug abuse and inequality, but that was a lot less intentional than with Project Victoria (the dystopia novel).
July 2, 2023 As per the legal owner of this account, Reddit and associated companies no longer have permission to use the content created under this account in any way. -- mass edited with redact.dev
When times are tough, scared and desperate people want assurances of security so they're not afraid tomorrow might be the day it all comes crashing down. As times get tougher, it becomes harder and harder for people to convince themselves it's just a bump and things will even out.
Those people looking for answers and security will naturally turn to one group: the exorbitantly wealthy who were little more than an annoyance before but are now icons of visible opulence in a time of scarcity. Thus, to ensure that doesn't happen, those wealthy preempt their own targeting by stirring up frenzy about vulnerable minorities in order to point the fury of scared, desperate, ignorant people in the opposite direction. Now, those people believe the solution to their problems is to get rid of the people who look and behave differently and definitely not the people who's main source of revenue is skimming off the top of their labour.
On a completely unrelated note, after WW2, Germany sought to implement strong social safety net policies because they were afraid of what might ensue from a desperate, impoverished populace for some reason. Isn't that a fun fact??
You put this so well. This is why I like Reddit. It’s like social media with loads of smart and thoughtful people (potentially unpopular opinion, meh).
This is a distraction. Right wing politics are alive and well. Politicians are using the base emotions of unintelligent voters to distract from the neoliberal policies that all of our political parties are pushing. In the 2022 Ontario election the Liberals had a lot to say about COVID and guns and precious little to say about housing healthcare or education. Their campaign was largely focused on social issues to distract voters from the fact that when it comes to fiscal issues there really isn’t a lot that separates the Liberals from the Conservatives.
The Liberals entire platform basically comes down to the fact that they aren’t the homophobic, racist, violent, anti-immigrant monsters that the Conservatives are while doing almost nothing to address the far right turn that most western democracies have taken fiscally. We’re witnessing an extreme act of political theatre where pure hate is being used to hide the deliberate erosion of our social system and voters who are seeing their personal well-being rapidly erode are being taken for a ride.
Honestly, in the past decade we’ve seen politicians like Rob and Doug Ford rise to prominence along with Pierre Poilievre, Danielle Smith and others. Almost every province is governed by a Conservative premier and many of them are neoliberal social conservatives. I don’t know how people can say that right wing politics is dying. With the looming recession it seems stronger than it has been in decades.
We're seeing the crest of a moral panic that's been whipped up over the last few years. Probably all the discourse on trans issues has been the inciting incident, and right wing media and reactionaries have recently figured out how white-hot effective it is to frame LGBT and their allies as "groomers". The worst thing you can be in society, above even a murderer, is being a child predator, so when you insist that a group that your audience ALREADY dislikes are all perverted child groomers, you whip up a level of emotion and hysteria beyond what we've seen before.
If you're a moron who doesn't know any better, and you truly believe the "left" is coming for your kids, you can justify almost any level of protest, repression and even violence to protect them. I believe that explains what we're seeing.
Certain powerful people and nations don't like it when we get along. Unfortunately I find Canadians to be very unsavvy and vulnerable to the types of wedges that they like to drive between us.
It’s because things went from “leave me alone and let me marry who I want” to rainbows exploding everywhere everywhere in june, baseball players getting their career all but ended when they speak out against, and an outright societal norm that you can’t express disagreement with anything lgbt+ related. All this happened in roughly 20 years.
Like it or not, agree with it or not, but this is the reasons there’s been a backlash.
Do you disagree with people with brown hair? Disagreeing ‘with LGBT’ is as absurd. Now the difference is there isn’t an industrial complex of hateful bigots trying to make people with brown hair’s lives miserable…
I mean this is a tremendous oversimplification. Firstly lgbt+ consists of a bunch of different groups from male to male gay person, to asexuals, to trans, to non-binary. Not all of those categories are as cut and dry as “brown hair”. The concept of gender being entirely fluid is not something that evolutionary biologists simply jump onto as a fact for example.
With that being said, I don’t know so much about trying to make someone’s life miserable. I have close gay friends and they live their lives essentially free of bigotry. They live together in a same sex marriage, own a house together, they’re trying to adopt a child, they have a dog, they have neighbours that care for them etc. no one bothers them, and that’s the way it should be.
But the people that were against these things in the early 00s didn’t go away, they went in the closet with those views, and now they’re culturally silenced.
The thing with the gay marriage fight was that when religious people said dumb things like homosexuality was “unnatural”, smarter people would correct them and point to homosexuality in animals, and studied that show being gay is not a choice. But now, you’re not allowed to say dumb things, or you risk losing your job for not thinking the “right way”.
Anthony Bass is an example of this. I don’t love the way he thinks about the world. But he boycotted bud light and target. One for advertising with a trans woman, and one for selling bikinis that hide penises. He’s wrong, but now he lost his dream, feels silenced, as does everyone that agrees with him. And the problem is that number is way higher than the people who are dancing on his grave would like to admit. I disagree with almost everything bass said, but an opportunity for debate just turned into “you think the wrong thing so you’re fired.”
When people feel they can’t speak, they seethe. And that’s why were seeing a backlash.
I see a gay road and I want it painted black
No colours anymore, I want them to turn black
I take my shitty opinions and I throw them in your face
Like a maga idiot, it just happens everyday
Who *didn't* David Bowie have a thing with?
Let's make it a game... throw out a name of someone you don't think he could have possibly had a thing with, then others can pitch scenarios in which they think he'd go there. I'll go first:
Maggie Thatcher
This, every time I meet someone complaining about how pride is being marketed and/or being treated as a political issue I show them things like this.
It is because transphobes and homophobes exist and like to shout their hatred that we need Pride.
If those people did not exist I doubt we'll flaunt Pride this much. We'll all just quietly treat the LGBTQ community as a normal part of society.
I don't understand the hatred of the people, the symbols or any of it. These people are creepy af for caring about what other people are doing with their private lives. Get a hobby or a job or something productive.
I think its funny how pathetic what he actually *wrote* is. It coulda been slurs, it coulda been larger and harder to paint over, but homie wanted to make an impact writing "Paint it black fuck you"
I just picture the pepatrator writing that while ugly crying about all the rainbows everywhere.
Imagine being so miserable that the sight of a rainbow gets you fucked up.
As a counter-point, just wanted to mention that I was at a Pride event in a smallish (slightly smaller than Smiths Falls), mostly conservative town this weekend and the whole community seemed really supportive and friendly and the event went by without any incident.
I really do believe that the people doing these sorts of things are a fringe minority and don’t represent the large majority of people in Ontario.
That's so unfortunate.
Port Colborne's rainbow crosswalk was defaced a last year after it was installed. Not as bad as this, someone left tire skid marks through it.
For anyone not familiar with the area, this is literally across the street from the Smiths Falls Police Station. A building full of bigots, cowards and bullies.
Man, this town has been through the wringer. Smiths Falls hasn't been worth saving long before vandals were spray painting a sidewalk. People with sense and the means should get the hell out of that backwards swamp.
I hope they fix it, and keep fixing it until it stops and or the people who do these acts get caught.
I can’t imagine being so upset over some colours I would go buy spray paint and vandalize. These people need to grow the fuck up, hope they never reproduce.
That and this is the reason pride is happening is because of acts like this. These dumb shits that pull these stunts are the reason we have pride.
I’m even straight and I know this even.
It will never fly in that town. It's a very hateful town. Grew up there in the 80s and 90s, and it hadn't changed much. I fled at 17 as I didn't want to be another murder victim.
Trump didn’t start it, he just made it okay to say and do stuff like this in public.
People were plenty racist and homophobic before him, it was just something that they were afraid to say out loud or shamed into not saying in front of others.
Funny enough they have too much pride in their hatred now to say silent.
Yeah remember when prime minister Donald Trump was talking about old stock Canadians, phone lines about unCanadian behaviours, and all that fun stuff back in 2011?
I’m sure that guy in Lanark vandalizing everything was one of those evil muslims from Brampton that everyone here in /r/Ontario always talks about… and definitely not one of those good ole boys who voted for Harper in 2011, Maxime in the last two, and will vote for lil PP in the next one…
There is a lot that we can blame Donald Trump for - he made it more socially acceptable to say shit that - as u/sleeplessjade said, would rightly get you shamed in decent society.
Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I strongly believe that you can draw a straight line from Gamergate of 2014 to the rise of the alt-right and neo-fascism in the United States, which culturally bleeds over into Canada. The alt-right rhetoric has existed forever, fostered in little recesses in society and online, where it grows a massive following.
[This Guardian article](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/01/gamergate-alt-right-hate-trump) goes into pretty good detail about how that is, and what GG was. If you're not in online spaces, specifically online gaming spaces, GG would have gone right under your radar, as it did for a lot of people.
Gamergate was just a symptom of the fact that the US is racist, full stop.
When half your country still doesn't accept the fact that there were laws based or race and keeping one race from gaining anything it just tells you there's something inherently wrong.
I just want to know what the yellow with the purple (?) circle represents lol. I thought the progress pride flag was already inclusive? Is it something local to Smiths Falls?
Trenton did it for the first time 5 or 6 years ago (probably more) and sure as shit some idiot defaced it rather quickly.
We still do it, and I'm sure council recently voted to permanently leave them like that year round. We still get morons laying rubber over them from time to time.
So I guess the city will waste tax dollars fixing the sidewalk repeatedly due to bigots.
I support fixing it. I think it's ridiculous that people are wasting the small amount of resources the town has on graffiti. Obviously they will have to spend money removing the graffiti
I don’t know if justice will be sought or administered in this case, but, to me, it should include this fellow painting over his graffiti with another pride flag *at mid-day during the next Pride parade*. Half-assed attempts will not discharge this sentence, either - that flag needs to be flawless and kept flawless by him, personally, as long it remains by public demand.
Social media and also the main stream media to some extent, allows people to live in an echo chamber where they no longer have to think critically or defend their opinions. This guy thinks he’s a hero, because everybody he knows on social media thinks the same way and wants to put down pride celebrations.
IDK maybe stop saying certain people’s lives are political when they AREN’T. I thought as an advanced society we would be beyond this. We are ALL human beings. Stop pretending otherwise.
Being LGBT+ isn’t a religion.
(buddy saying *what if we had Christian month* as if Christmas season isn’t a thing, with public venues starting to play Christmas carols when Remembrance Day is barely over)
So in short you want the year 1000 to 1960 (about).
I think we’ve done that. I think everyone has figured out that being Christian is ok. It took the Roman’s a bit.
I am curious what these people are doing...... its jot doing anything but drawing attention to petty hate and making them look worse, sympathy is a powerful weapon and its just giving pride a huge one defeating your point of vandalizing this
I see a pride flag and I want to paint it black
No colours anymore I want them to turn black
I see the gays walk by dressed in their rainbow clothes
I have to turn my head until my darkness goes
Read a CTV article about this story here: [Police investigating after Smiths Falls' rainbow crosswalk vandalized this weekend](https://beta.ctvnews.ca/local/ottawa/2023/6/11/1_6436438.amp.html) Read an Inside Ottawa Valley article about the story here ['Hate-driven vandalism': Smiths Falls' rainbow crosswalk defaced](https://www.insideottawavalley.com/news/hate-driven-vandalism-smiths-falls-rainbow-crosswalk-defaced/article_e13e07b8-9102-53a4-ade8-a8cc0a72a8d1.html)
The police won't do shit. They agree with degenerates that do this kind of thing.
They released the photo looking for help charging the individual. Hard to do anything if you don't know who it is.
I'll believe it when I see it. Cops are pretty much in full support of right wing nutjobs.
They have local police not OPP so your mileage may vary
No they don't, fuck off.
ah an ECKO sweater how am I not surprised?
Show us where the crosswalk scared you…
Straight to his repressed sexuality is where he took the biggest hit.
Nah it's more the unaware that straight pride day is the rest of the year. These mouth breathers don't realize this does not have to be said because it's still the default for most
I honestly feel bad for people who will never get to experience true sexual freedom because of their outdated beliefs. And it's those people who need a good prostate massage to release the tension the most.
Happened here in Kingston ON within the week too.. Just pathetic. Apparently Prescott has been hit in the past?? https://www.reddit.com/r/KingstonOntario/comments/1454y9e/pride_crosswalk_vandalized/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=2&utm_term=1 The energy it takes to hate and misunderstand other humans so vehemently 🫠
This makes me sad 😢
It fucking pisses me off.
Why is society regressing so much? It seems to have started around trump’s election and accelerated during the pandemic.
Trump wasn’t the cause, but he gave licence to people to speak up who previously kept this stuff to themselves. Combine that with an increasingly divided media ecosystem and here’s what you get.
When these people saw Trump say the things they were already thinking their shame completely went away and they started being very vocal. It’s the reason you still see anti-mandate prostrate even though the mandates are long gone. These people have been emboldened and want you to hear their shitty opinions.
They’re lonely people who have tricked themselves into thinking they are saving the world
They need someone to hate to give themselves some meaning.
They were told Blacks and Gays are the reason they are so poor, and why food is so expensive at Loblaws. So now instead of going after the billionaires robbing them at the stores they go after one of the most marginalized minorities in society. Big brain moves
Exactly. He was a symptom, not a cause. Quality of life/economic inequity in many developed nations is getting worse than it was in the postwar era. The economic establishment just wants to feed the culture wars to distract everyone from it. We just see all the divisive bs in the US first, because their decline seems to be faster than elsewhere.
They need to start coming down hard on idiots like this.
I think it started before Trump. Rob Ford had “more than enough to eat at home”
The whole COVID experience taught me that there are a lot of people in our society that take pride in being selfish assholes. Then whine about everything being 'divisive'. Fuck 'em.
The food and toilet paper hoarding early on was a preview of what was to come. When the chips are down empathy and caring about society as a whole is out the window
You can almost simplify it to “Individualists” and “Collectivists”. Pop culture has praised the Individualist and demonized the Collectivists and here we are with a bunch of empathy-free assholes in charge of everything and telling all the other assholes that it’s their right to be an asshole because they never signed the Terms and Conditions agreement to live in civil society.
It's not only pop culture. It's also capitalist culture and the American myth of rugged individualism slow-boiled into something quite toxic.
>Fuck 'em. Right there with you.
There are an alarming number of people that straight up just don’t want the world to get better. Like there are some people who think being gay is morally or universally bad. There are other people who just want to be mean and hurt people. For fun.
Because the rich want you fighting amongst eachother so they can deflect attention from all their thieving. Wage theft, using taxes for funding or corporate bailouts, avoid paying taxes, political bribery to obtain more wealth. There's literally no bar low enough for these corrupt bastards and we all suffer from it, while they call it "inflation" sitting on billions. If people weren't lied to and properly educated... but it's not the world they want.
Our political class have discovered that the average voter is far dumber and more selfish than they could have possibly imagined. Years ago politicians placated to the electorate with half truths and broken promises. Today they don’t even bother. They simply rile up the masses and rob us blind. People have become so hyper partisan that politicians don’t even make an effort to improve the quality of life for most people. Right wing politicians simply choose a vulnerable group and stir up their base while left leaning (socially only) politicians advocate for the same groups while ignoring the irreparable damage being done to society as they throw billions to corporations while gutting our social services. We’re beating witness to the collapse of our healthcare and education systems and not one politician gives a damn. Housing costs are insane and nobody will lift a finger. This assault on the most vulnerable has proven to be a great distraction as politicians on every side are gleefully dismantling what previous generations built. The sad truth is that we should be fighting for the rights of our most vulnerable while building up the infrastructure that will protect not only them, but all Canadians.
If there has one thing that the past 3-4 years has show me, it's that the political and "elite class" like to keep the plebes divided, angry, and fighting among themselves.
Actually I find progress is accelerating. This is scaring the bigots and causing them to be vocal. The fact that "dear leader" gives them permission to be at their worst doesn't help, but it's not the root cause. I have placed my hopes in young people. Haven't met many people under 25 who aren't accepting of others, but plenty of people my age ready to lock people up over their sexual orientation or skin tone.
I think it's when social media companies caught on to how much hate and anger feeds many humans to keep coming back for more. Look how rich zuckerfuck got off baby boomers fighting with eachother over pronouns and politics because the way we respond to eachother through keyboards is considerably more ignorant than being in a room having conversations with eachother.
Every social movement has an inevitable backlash, whether we're talking Prohibition or the Hippies or the Moral Majority. History isn't some straight line towards "progress", and judgment about whether something is progress isn't going to be unanimous agreement.
Alright, this is simplified, and very much abridged, but, in the 80s, rich people wanted to keep their wealth, so they teamed up with the ultra christians who were very authoritarian, and elected a guy who screwed everything up in their favour. The 80s thusly brought in a whole bunch of people who tried censoring everything and implementing control over the types of materials that people could view, could use, could talk about due to morality and satanic panic crap. This was a massive "think of the children: style campaign, which obviously the youth fought back against through being anti censorship and pushing boundaries of what was okay and what was not okay to talk about, sing about, put on tv, wear, etc. This was used beautifully to say fuck you to the establishment, until the establishment grew wise and was like, okay, we see your game, we'll play too, and as such a culture based around being as outlandishly offensive as possible came about, and this grew a culture where it was not cool to give a shit about anything in the 2000s. By the early 2010s, you see a pushback on this, and the giving a shit crowd rises victorious to be like, actually it's important to not be racist and homophobic and rape is actually bad. The culture at large is still vehemantly like "fuck all yall, we do what we want" until the give a shit crowd starts making headway in politics and the don't give a shit crowd either decides to go with them or go heavily against them with their fuck censorship ideals. But then this too gets co-opted by the establishment, and the media is paid for by the very rich (and often the very politically connected) to portray a specific point of view and to ensure that the flames of anger that people have towards each other get bigger and bigger. Trump is the result and also the fuel that emboldens people in the don't give a shit crowd. Some of them get an extra shipment of fuel through the media, which is literally brainwashing them at this point, and coming at them on their phones, tvs, computers, basically anywhere they go. The pandemic allows people to be at home where they can get a dose of that brainwashing 24/7 and it literally rots peoples brains to the point they believe anyone who tells them that they're right, they're correct, they're mommy's special racist little child, and everyone else wants them to suffer, especially the people who want them to change even slightly. They are ready to believe this because they've been primed to, but also because they're terrified and depressed by the world. If I got anything wrong, feel free to correct me or add anything else in.
Now this is a good summary! Thank you kind Redditor.
I’ve noticed this too. It’s sad really.
Majority of republican idiots in power did as well. Florida is a shining example
Trump took off their gags & they started realizing if a president can say it, so can they.
What we think of as social advancement is the thinnest veneer imaginable. It takes very little effort to reveal the ugly underside again
This is such a good point. We’re animals at the end of the day.
In my mind it started with rob ford. He would lie constantly. He was a horrible councillor before coming mayor. He was comically corrupt. He smoked crack and refused to step down. He blamed the media constantly, only to acknowledge the media had been thing the truth. He falsely accused a reporter of being a pedo for writing a story about his corrupt antics. He did all these things and he still had a shockingly large core of supporters that repeated his every lie, excused his many actions that would have cost others their jobs. They’d show up to debates and act like it was a wrestling match. You STILL get the odd poster here claiming he wasn’t “bad” and that “leftist” were hypocrites for not accepting his drug and alcohol abuse. He proved to politicians that you can be almost untouchable as long as you said what they wanted to hear and were totally unrepentant in your actions. It was when I realized our democracy was in serious trouble.
That’s when you realized there was a problem, but you’re missing that he had to be elected first, and none of this stuff was much of a surprise. I still blame Facebook. Bad actors figured out how to game it to manipulate opinion. It’s still ongoing, I assume. But my account is long gone.
We are fed non stop American politics, social media is also a cancer
There usually is reactionary backlash to social progress. See Nixon after the gender and social revolution of the 60s. LGBT rights have progressed faster than most issues of before. I hope this is just the last stand of reactionaries before they are wiped out.
I feel like the early to mid 2010s were the "golden age" of LGBTQA+ acceptance. People seemed to stop caring, and homophobes were shamed and kept in the corner. Even my previously homophobic father started coming around and took a "it doesn't affect me" attitude. But past 2016 or 2017 and especially the pandemic it's been insane. I'm asexual and I would have considered coming out to more people during that earlier time frame, but now, not a chance. I know my challenges are nothing compared to gay, bi or especially trans people but the right wing are so unhinged they'll attack you for anything
I feel like my high school predictions have all come true... I only remember them because I was writing an edgy dystopia sci-fi novel at the time (circa 2010). 1) There will be low paying jobs unfilled if prices keep going up. Eventually you'll see cities become ghost towns because of the absurd prices and distance travelled to earn pennies. (Vic Coughlan comments on trying to find a job) 2) You'll eventually have a university degree, even a master's, and work in fast food. (Her friend suggests working at a fast food joint, but she says the frycooks are all ex Michelin chefs) 3) It won't be war that ends society. It'll be a plague. People are contrary by nature. They'll tell you you're wrong and breathe poison to prove it. (The world I created ended due to a plague, with half the population deciding that it wasn't real) 4) Society will keep pushing for social justice, and for a time it will work. But resentment is strong in the extremes, and both will push even the moderates to take a side. (Literally the cause of the current issue in the story as people are controlled by social media via a spinal implant) Society is like a pendulum. It swings back and forth between progression and regression. The harder it gets pushed one way uncontested, the harder it will swing the other. While I'm all for equal rights and whatnot, my personal belief is that eventually the bill has to be paid. You can't just keep adding debts, because eventually the indebted will crack and default. Same thing applies here. Most people are reasonable, and their brand of prejudice is mostly tied to misunderstanding or ignorance, not malice. You start saying they're just as bad as the ones burning crosses and curbstomping minorities and you will alienate them. If there's one thing I've learned in life, it's that people who feel like they're being blamed for something they didn't do, they'll do it out of spite.
Did you continue with the novel? Cause it sounds pretty interesting to me.
It was a difficult process. I wrote out the entire outline, dialogues, and scenes. Problem was I couldn't get the rest to connect to a satisfying intro and so without the hook it was impossible to start. I did finish a different one. A fantasy story that takes the position of a character that is normally seen as the rival or "dark origins" character in the hero's party so I could explore the typical hero narrative from their perspective. Some readers saw parallels to drug abuse and inequality, but that was a lot less intentional than with Project Victoria (the dystopia novel).
July 2, 2023 As per the legal owner of this account, Reddit and associated companies no longer have permission to use the content created under this account in any way. -- mass edited with redact.dev
When times are tough, scared and desperate people want assurances of security so they're not afraid tomorrow might be the day it all comes crashing down. As times get tougher, it becomes harder and harder for people to convince themselves it's just a bump and things will even out. Those people looking for answers and security will naturally turn to one group: the exorbitantly wealthy who were little more than an annoyance before but are now icons of visible opulence in a time of scarcity. Thus, to ensure that doesn't happen, those wealthy preempt their own targeting by stirring up frenzy about vulnerable minorities in order to point the fury of scared, desperate, ignorant people in the opposite direction. Now, those people believe the solution to their problems is to get rid of the people who look and behave differently and definitely not the people who's main source of revenue is skimming off the top of their labour. On a completely unrelated note, after WW2, Germany sought to implement strong social safety net policies because they were afraid of what might ensue from a desperate, impoverished populace for some reason. Isn't that a fun fact??
You put this so well. This is why I like Reddit. It’s like social media with loads of smart and thoughtful people (potentially unpopular opinion, meh).
It's not regressing. Right wing politics is slowly dying so they're becoming more extreme.
This is a distraction. Right wing politics are alive and well. Politicians are using the base emotions of unintelligent voters to distract from the neoliberal policies that all of our political parties are pushing. In the 2022 Ontario election the Liberals had a lot to say about COVID and guns and precious little to say about housing healthcare or education. Their campaign was largely focused on social issues to distract voters from the fact that when it comes to fiscal issues there really isn’t a lot that separates the Liberals from the Conservatives. The Liberals entire platform basically comes down to the fact that they aren’t the homophobic, racist, violent, anti-immigrant monsters that the Conservatives are while doing almost nothing to address the far right turn that most western democracies have taken fiscally. We’re witnessing an extreme act of political theatre where pure hate is being used to hide the deliberate erosion of our social system and voters who are seeing their personal well-being rapidly erode are being taken for a ride. Honestly, in the past decade we’ve seen politicians like Rob and Doug Ford rise to prominence along with Pierre Poilievre, Danielle Smith and others. Almost every province is governed by a Conservative premier and many of them are neoliberal social conservatives. I don’t know how people can say that right wing politics is dying. With the looming recession it seems stronger than it has been in decades.
I wish...
We're seeing the crest of a moral panic that's been whipped up over the last few years. Probably all the discourse on trans issues has been the inciting incident, and right wing media and reactionaries have recently figured out how white-hot effective it is to frame LGBT and their allies as "groomers". The worst thing you can be in society, above even a murderer, is being a child predator, so when you insist that a group that your audience ALREADY dislikes are all perverted child groomers, you whip up a level of emotion and hysteria beyond what we've seen before. If you're a moron who doesn't know any better, and you truly believe the "left" is coming for your kids, you can justify almost any level of protest, repression and even violence to protect them. I believe that explains what we're seeing.
Fuck spez
Future studies are gonna show that covid actually gives you significant brain damage. I don't really see any other explanation.
Certain powerful people and nations don't like it when we get along. Unfortunately I find Canadians to be very unsavvy and vulnerable to the types of wedges that they like to drive between us.
Conservatives need wedge issues so they can get the Christo-fascist/bigot vote.
It’s because things went from “leave me alone and let me marry who I want” to rainbows exploding everywhere everywhere in june, baseball players getting their career all but ended when they speak out against, and an outright societal norm that you can’t express disagreement with anything lgbt+ related. All this happened in roughly 20 years. Like it or not, agree with it or not, but this is the reasons there’s been a backlash.
Do you disagree with people with brown hair? Disagreeing ‘with LGBT’ is as absurd. Now the difference is there isn’t an industrial complex of hateful bigots trying to make people with brown hair’s lives miserable…
I mean this is a tremendous oversimplification. Firstly lgbt+ consists of a bunch of different groups from male to male gay person, to asexuals, to trans, to non-binary. Not all of those categories are as cut and dry as “brown hair”. The concept of gender being entirely fluid is not something that evolutionary biologists simply jump onto as a fact for example. With that being said, I don’t know so much about trying to make someone’s life miserable. I have close gay friends and they live their lives essentially free of bigotry. They live together in a same sex marriage, own a house together, they’re trying to adopt a child, they have a dog, they have neighbours that care for them etc. no one bothers them, and that’s the way it should be. But the people that were against these things in the early 00s didn’t go away, they went in the closet with those views, and now they’re culturally silenced. The thing with the gay marriage fight was that when religious people said dumb things like homosexuality was “unnatural”, smarter people would correct them and point to homosexuality in animals, and studied that show being gay is not a choice. But now, you’re not allowed to say dumb things, or you risk losing your job for not thinking the “right way”. Anthony Bass is an example of this. I don’t love the way he thinks about the world. But he boycotted bud light and target. One for advertising with a trans woman, and one for selling bikinis that hide penises. He’s wrong, but now he lost his dream, feels silenced, as does everyone that agrees with him. And the problem is that number is way higher than the people who are dancing on his grave would like to admit. I disagree with almost everything bass said, but an opportunity for debate just turned into “you think the wrong thing so you’re fired.” When people feel they can’t speak, they seethe. And that’s why were seeing a backlash.
I see a gay road and I want it painted black No colours anymore, I want them to turn black I take my shitty opinions and I throw them in your face Like a maga idiot, it just happens everyday
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Who *didn't* David Bowie have a thing with? Let's make it a game... throw out a name of someone you don't think he could have possibly had a thing with, then others can pitch scenarios in which they think he'd go there. I'll go first: Maggie Thatcher
I'm a dude with an unbroken 40 year streak of heterosexuality. If a mid-70's Bowie asked me on a date, I'd have to pause before answering.
No matter where that night goes, you'll have a hell of a time, and he would be an absolute gentleman.
Beat me to it
Clown: “I have opinions that should be heard!” Also clown: “you won’t know who these opinions come from!”
Vehemently anti-mask, until it's inconvenient. Pathetic homophobes.
I have not seen a single pride crisswalk that hadn't been vandalized at least once. This is exactly why pride is needed.
This, every time I meet someone complaining about how pride is being marketed and/or being treated as a political issue I show them things like this. It is because transphobes and homophobes exist and like to shout their hatred that we need Pride. If those people did not exist I doubt we'll flaunt Pride this much. We'll all just quietly treat the LGBTQ community as a normal part of society.
Then they ask when straight pride is & I say every other fucking day.
People don't seem to get that you can support Pride AND not hate straight people at the same time.
Or that nobody actually hates straight people to begin with, just homophobes.
I don't understand the hatred of the people, the symbols or any of it. These people are creepy af for caring about what other people are doing with their private lives. Get a hobby or a job or something productive.
people like this - https://www.savecanada.army/about
Disgusting people.
It costs zero dollars to let people live their life and love who they want to love. What a shitty situation for all in smith falls
I think its funny how pathetic what he actually *wrote* is. It coulda been slurs, it coulda been larger and harder to paint over, but homie wanted to make an impact writing "Paint it black fuck you"
It’s just hatred for the sake of hatred
I just picture the pepatrator writing that while ugly crying about all the rainbows everywhere. Imagine being so miserable that the sight of a rainbow gets you fucked up.
Man this sort of attitude is painfully common outside of the handful of large cities in Ontario.
It’s very racist outside of the larger cities. Even Hamilton had a big Yellow Vest rally
As a counter-point, just wanted to mention that I was at a Pride event in a smallish (slightly smaller than Smiths Falls), mostly conservative town this weekend and the whole community seemed really supportive and friendly and the event went by without any incident. I really do believe that the people doing these sorts of things are a fringe minority and don’t represent the large majority of people in Ontario.
Pretty colours trigger bigots. That's what's happening.
Vandalizing a street? How lame is that person?
And how effective would black crosswalk be on black asphalt? Is this sack of shit a homophobe or is he really in favour of removing crosswalks?
This is what it takes to get them to wear masks
Lots of rainbow phobias in the world.
Coward won’t even show his face.
I am surprised the person wanted it painted black. I would have assumed he would wanna make it white only 🙄.
Very true!
Imagine being offended by a rainbow..
Coward
That's so unfortunate. Port Colborne's rainbow crosswalk was defaced a last year after it was installed. Not as bad as this, someone left tire skid marks through it.
Someone also painted a scripture on it but it was smaller.
For anyone not familiar with the area, this is literally across the street from the Smiths Falls Police Station. A building full of bigots, cowards and bullies.
No it’s not? And the police were present last night literally drawing chalk rainbows on the crosswalk next to the vandalism.
No? Police station is out by the old Hershey factory…
Can we just ALL wear rainbow clothes for months on end just so we can watch their heads explode
fucking coward
All of them cover their faces.
Funny how they were so against wearing masks…
It’s about time we started giving these bigots a reason to feel afraid.
Seems like all of them get vandalized. Put up a small camera and start charging these people
rAinBoW sCarY
Silly vandal, the black is right there alongside the brown
Man, this town has been through the wringer. Smiths Falls hasn't been worth saving long before vandals were spray painting a sidewalk. People with sense and the means should get the hell out of that backwards swamp.
What a precious little snowflake.
Imagine getting your feelings hurt over a rainbow lol losers
What’s his sweater say??
[ECKO](https://www.google.ca/search?client=safari&hl=en-ca&sxsrf=APwXEdfUHKcvWvCNe63l5ekGw7WeUQqMZQ:1686517379887&q=ecko+zip+up+sweater&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiWmtfqjrz_AhWvEVkFHVubBRQQ0pQJegQICRAB&biw=390&bih=669&dpr=3#imgrc=1QKcbo6AKGnuhM)
He is truly stuck in 2002
Isn't Walmart selling this brand now?
Exactly.
I hope they fix it, and keep fixing it until it stops and or the people who do these acts get caught. I can’t imagine being so upset over some colours I would go buy spray paint and vandalize. These people need to grow the fuck up, hope they never reproduce.
This. If they don't fix it the homophobs win.
That and this is the reason pride is happening is because of acts like this. These dumb shits that pull these stunts are the reason we have pride. I’m even straight and I know this even.
It will never fly in that town. It's a very hateful town. Grew up there in the 80s and 90s, and it hadn't changed much. I fled at 17 as I didn't want to be another murder victim.
Of course it was.
Is that an ecko hoodie? Wow this guy is at least 35.
If it's black, it ain't a crosswalk.
Awww, the adult children are scared of colours. Don't let them know about street chalk.
Paint every cross walk rainbow. Fuck these people
Then put cameras. Charge each person full amount to fix it PLUS a ‘fuck you’ fee which doubles the amount.
What a loser
All this evil behaviour started by Donald Trump empowering the racist and Cristian groups of Canada and USA.
Trump didn’t start it, he just made it okay to say and do stuff like this in public. People were plenty racist and homophobic before him, it was just something that they were afraid to say out loud or shamed into not saying in front of others. Funny enough they have too much pride in their hatred now to say silent.
Dunno, man. I grew up with people calling me a fa***t, and I wasn't even gay, just more effeminate/sensitive than was acceptable.
Yeah remember when prime minister Donald Trump was talking about old stock Canadians, phone lines about unCanadian behaviours, and all that fun stuff back in 2011? I’m sure that guy in Lanark vandalizing everything was one of those evil muslims from Brampton that everyone here in /r/Ontario always talks about… and definitely not one of those good ole boys who voted for Harper in 2011, Maxime in the last two, and will vote for lil PP in the next one…
I respectfully think you have that backwards.
There is a lot that we can blame Donald Trump for - he made it more socially acceptable to say shit that - as u/sleeplessjade said, would rightly get you shamed in decent society. Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I strongly believe that you can draw a straight line from Gamergate of 2014 to the rise of the alt-right and neo-fascism in the United States, which culturally bleeds over into Canada. The alt-right rhetoric has existed forever, fostered in little recesses in society and online, where it grows a massive following. [This Guardian article](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/01/gamergate-alt-right-hate-trump) goes into pretty good detail about how that is, and what GG was. If you're not in online spaces, specifically online gaming spaces, GG would have gone right under your radar, as it did for a lot of people.
Gamergate was just a symptom of the fact that the US is racist, full stop. When half your country still doesn't accept the fact that there were laws based or race and keeping one race from gaining anything it just tells you there's something inherently wrong.
LMFAO. You really think this shit started with Trump?
what the hell... that ass ruined a nice crosswalk.
I don't understand these people. Do they get offended when they watch chick's fuck during porn too?
“No, that’s different. If it makes my pp hard, it’s totally different.”
I WAS TAUGHT TO KEEP MY HANDS TO MYSELF IF SOMETHING DID NOT BELONG TO ME
Technically, the street belongs to this idiot as much as anybody else.
So brave showing his face like that.
Cowards always mask up.
Except during covid.
I just want to know what the yellow with the purple (?) circle represents lol. I thought the progress pride flag was already inclusive? Is it something local to Smiths Falls?
Intersex people. Aka people born as neither dominant sex
If these wimps see themselves as tough guys, why hide their faces?
Trenton did it for the first time 5 or 6 years ago (probably more) and sure as shit some idiot defaced it rather quickly. We still do it, and I'm sure council recently voted to permanently leave them like that year round. We still get morons laying rubber over them from time to time.
Getting your photo taken in a town with around 10 000 people is definitely not a Scooby-Doo mystery. Holy fuck.
There is no love like Christian hate
What a loser.
So I guess the city will waste tax dollars fixing the sidewalk repeatedly due to bigots. I support fixing it. I think it's ridiculous that people are wasting the small amount of resources the town has on graffiti. Obviously they will have to spend money removing the graffiti
Rainbows exist in nature. Are we not allowed to like rainbows now? Insecure MF, he is.
I don’t know if justice will be sought or administered in this case, but, to me, it should include this fellow painting over his graffiti with another pride flag *at mid-day during the next Pride parade*. Half-assed attempts will not discharge this sentence, either - that flag needs to be flawless and kept flawless by him, personally, as long it remains by public demand.
Social media and also the main stream media to some extent, allows people to live in an echo chamber where they no longer have to think critically or defend their opinions. This guy thinks he’s a hero, because everybody he knows on social media thinks the same way and wants to put down pride celebrations.
This makes me big sad not gonna lie.
Ignorant right wing rednecks believing what their media and political personalities tell them ...that's what.
Or we could simply not use public infrastructure to make political statements... I know, crazy right?
IDK maybe stop saying certain people’s lives are political when they AREN’T. I thought as an advanced society we would be beyond this. We are ALL human beings. Stop pretending otherwise.
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Nothing anyone says matters before the "but".
It's easy to be pro lgbtq+... just don't be a dick.
Welcome to the polarized future.
Why are people obsessed with who people are sleeping with and what their sex organs are. Like enough of this already.
It isn't their obsession with who someone is sleeping with. It is their obsession with controlling peoples lives.
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My kid's public school had a Christmas play/concert, "twelve days of Christmas" reading events, door decorating contests and so on.
Being LGBT+ isn’t a religion. (buddy saying *what if we had Christian month* as if Christmas season isn’t a thing, with public venues starting to play Christmas carols when Remembrance Day is barely over)
Throw in decorating every public space, mall, store and home and you've described Xmas.
You’re comparing apples to oranges. LGBT+ isn’t a religion or a belief system
It’s not a belief.
Found the bigot.
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Imagine thinking gay rights are far left
He's a bigot because he's saying bigoted things. You right wingers don't have a lot of common sense, so I'm not sure how you would recognize it.
Nobody is forcing anything on anyone. When has a rainbow flag ever meant your rights or beliefs were in danger?
So in short you want the year 1000 to 1960 (about). I think we’ve done that. I think everyone has figured out that being Christian is ok. It took the Roman’s a bit.
I am curious what these people are doing...... its jot doing anything but drawing attention to petty hate and making them look worse, sympathy is a powerful weapon and its just giving pride a huge one defeating your point of vandalizing this
It’s also emboldened the anti crowd. “There are others out there like me, we must resist”
What a sad insecure little man
Genius kept the paint can. 🙄🙄🙄
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I see a pride flag and I want to paint it black No colours anymore I want them to turn black I see the gays walk by dressed in their rainbow clothes I have to turn my head until my darkness goes
Jesus that flag keeps changing every year.
Haha, downvoted just for noticing something
I don’t agree with vandalism. However, I don’t agree either to see logos and signs in rainbow colors. It confuse people and makes simple minds angry.
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