Trust the person sitting next to you on the bus over the person agreeing with you online.
Listening to: Rain - Shad
- 4 Posts
- 14 Comments
17·10 days agoSkippy pretending to care about worker’s rights. That’ll be… fun. I imagine the Manning Centre’s PR machine working overtime on another makeover right now. Brainstorming, “what do workers look like” and next time he steps out it’ll be in overalls and a big straw hat, or an old school rail porter’s uniform. It’ll be up there with Harper’s weird cowboy leather daddy moment.
It is depressing. Thinking about Carney’s Davos speech where he referenced Havel’s Power of the Powerless, taking the “workers of the world unite” sign out of the window. I didn’t think he meant it literally.
Good link. Everyone involved with that project is an angel. So grateful they swim in the shit so I don’t have to.
Until 2020, I still had the heart to pay attention to white supremacists and other accellerationists on the internet and off: keep track of the slimy shell game renaming they do, where they organized, all that crap. Now it just makes me nuts, so I check in monthly with antihate, mainly looking for any new flags, symbols, group names, locations and so on, so I can recognise them irl.
It’s SO similar. Same klepto-maniacial imperialist twits were inventing laws/policies for your country and mine: “free land” if you can clear it, white christian men are people and everyone else are uncivilized things, etc.
We call upon federal, provincial, territorial, and municipal governments to repudiate concepts used to justify European sovereignty over Indigenous peoples and lands, such as the Doctrine of Discovery and terra nullius, and to reform those laws, government policies, and litigation strategies that continue to rely on such concepts. - Call to Action 47 of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada
Thanks for the link, OP. Very worth the read.
These moments of hostility are more than personal insults; they represent a fracturing of the Canadian sanctuary I once knew, signaling a shift from a culture of mutual support to tribalism that now threatens, at various levels, the very multicultural fabric of our nation. In this delicate moment for both Canada and the world, it is time to confront the rise of these harmful ideologies and make a better country for all who live here. […]
This situation demands that we look beyond immigration laws and address the social sickness spreading within our communities, where everyone identifies as “Canadian” only to label the next person as the “alien.”
This reality is agonizing because when I first arrived in Canada, I felt I had reached the safest place in the world for social rights and harmony. Now, I feel that arguments are no longer arguments; they are one-dimensional screams. No one is looking for a calm, shared logic to solve our communal responsibilities. Instead, we are following egos and deceptive rhetoric that only seek an audience. This is the breeding ground for extremist ideological demagoguery.
Not even that. I’m seeing nothing about any fines in the linked article.
For being nice about being investigated and promising to do better next time, they get to continue trawling and stealing whatever the fuck they want (if I’m reading this right). Same shit when the parasite class rolled out Uber, AirB&B, PayPal, etc. “Yes, this breaks every applicable labour and privacy law we have to protect people, but it’s here so what are you gonna do about it.”
I knew we couldn’t trust the Netherlands and Indiana.
Well worth the watch! Also, TIL about the nifty Media Ecosystem Observatory project.
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Some related astroturf history in Canada:
EthicalOil(dot)org - 2012
Conservatives hired actors to play supporters at the Ontario leaders debate. “You know, politicians hiring actors to play supporters is like the way it works in the Third World.” - Devanshu Narang, an actor who didn’t answer the casting call. - 2018
The Manning Centre (rebranded as the Strong and Free Network in 2020) and the Proud crowd pumping out anti-Liberal ads during the federal election in 2019.
Hundreds of bots geotagged in Russia, France, etc posted messages saying they went to a Poiliviere rally in Kirkland Lake, Ontario in 2024.
Blatant astroturf in Caledon, Ontario (again) in 2026.
2·1 month ago13 years later, did Doug ever sue the Globe for slander like he threatened? I don’t think he did.
tl;dr: Old dealers and drug users told the Globe that from high school to age 22, Doug dealt a lot of drugs to other drug dealers. The police in his area said they had no recollection of anything to do with any of the Fords and drugs, including the officer that arrested Randy Ford (Rob and Doug’s other brother) for putting someone in a trunk and kidnapping them to shake the kidnapee’s parents down for drug money. Snippit:
As a dealer, Doug Ford was not highly visible. Another source, “Tom,” who also supplied street-level dealers and has a long criminal record, said his girlfriend at the time would complain, whenever he was arrested, that he needed to be more calculating “like Doug.” […] When asked where Mr. Ford fit in the hierarchy of dealers in their neighbourhood, [another interviewee] replied: “He’d be at the top.”
Literally just mocking democracy at this point.
I found more details about when those resignations happened from a link in OP’s link:
Feb 9 - council approves a zoning change “to allow the AI data centre to proceed to a design stage”
March 16 - another closed meeting, this time something about ethics complaints
March 18 - 4 of the 7 council members resign and they’re all mum about it. Maybe an NDA?
With the four resignations, Sherwood’s council no longer has quorum to conduct any meetings to address regular business. […] In the meantime, per The Municipalities Act, the Minister of Government Relations will appoint “one or more persons to act as members of council” to meet quorum requirements until the fall.
Also Middle of March, the Bell Canada President and Scott Moe came out and said “the data centre would be moving ahead in this spring.”
Now, April 20, another closed-door meeting. “We get so many emails tho.” “Oops, our audio was off until the vote part! Our bad!” “Don’t worry - they did a self-assessment.” It’s so blatant, it’s almost funny.
And when the Freedom City brainiacs suck up the last drop of fresh water during fire season to power a monstrosity nobody wants and only makes more work and less security for people, at least Interim Reeve Ray Orb will have the comfort of knowing it wasn’t wasted on some useless plant or person.
The R.M. arranged a livestream of the meeting but audio was unavailable until just before council voted unanimously
I want to live in a world where people go to jail for doing shit like this.
[edit to remove ranting about techbros]
If he’s new to anyone scrolling by, I’ve been listening to Shad for over a decade now and my favourite track of his is Fam Jam. Classic Canadiana.
Another nepobaby grifter Ford amplified by the press they’re attacking. jfc how many of them are there?
This is why Anti-SLAPP laws are so important. Alberta doesn’t have them, so Caylan’s whole case gets heard in full before a judge can rule on its merit. Rotten business.
Just a reminder for anyone scrolling by, Caylan also wrote that she was “saddened by the demographic replacement of white peoples in their homelands […] [I]t’s clear that it will not be a peaceful transition.” - press progress 2019
Just for context, the CTV story linked doesn’t mention it, but before Trump’s ragetweet, one of the Morouns met with Lutnick, Trump’s secretary of commerce. For anyone who hasn’t heard of them yet, the Moroun family across the water makes passive income in the billions off the Ambassador (troll) bridge. They even donated 1M to a Trump superPAC less than a month before Trump’s tweet.
The timing of the donation and Trump’s seeming change in position toward the new bridge is “somewhat of an unusual case” in the campaign finance world, according to Devin Judge-Lord, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.
“Usually everybody has strong incentives for these kinds of donations to not get attention,” said Judge Lord, adding that a position change “would normally only be taken if they didn’t believe they would generate a lot of news coverage.” CBC, Feb '26
The Morouns spent something like 30M back in 2012 opposing the Gordie Howe - made a fake group called The People Should Decide that created a petition that called for a referendum to amend Michigan’s constitution, just to preserve their monopoly. When that didn’t work in their favour, the next year they started suing:
Ambassador Bridge owner Matty Moroun has named the U.S. departments of State, Transportation, Coast Guard and Homeland Security, as well as the Canadian government, in a lawsuit to stop a new Detroit River bridge.
In the 92-page lawsuit filed in federal court in February, Moroun claims he has a “perpetual and exclusive franchise right” to operate the Windsor-Detroit crossing without competition from another bridge […]
“I’m not surprised, they have an enormous sense of entitlement.” The bridge company’s claim to exclusive rights to bridge traffic at the Windsor-Detroit crossing is something “nobody takes seriously. They are lashing out in all directions and trying to stop progress,” [Canada’s Consul General Roy Norton] said, “This is what they do.” - Windsor Star, Apr 2013
Yay for more generic meds to treat Type 2 Diabetes!
On the downside, doctors all over Canada are already being inundated by people with eating disorders who’ve been seeing ads for Ozempic/Wegovy/etc for a decade now, but couldn’t justify the expense. To all my fellow 1990s “nothing feels as good as skinny tastes!” extreme dieting survivors - wishing you mental clarity and self care in these crazy days.
Eating disorders and substance abuse are already very good buddies, and then there’s the nausea, diarrhea, vomiting and constipation side effects both Ozempic users and extreme dieters are already so familiar with. So many diabetes researchers have given the heads-up about the self-image problems, drug dependency and mental side effects (like depression and suicidal ideation) prediabetes drug treatments seemed to exacerbate. But even in the early 2000s the topic was so dominated by lobbying and hyperbole their concerns couldn’t make a dent.
Today it’s a gazillion times worse. We’ve all seen posts about these drugs get smothered by all those culty ED buzzwords (like “food noise”), evangelical testimonials and thousands of updoots within hours. Then mainstream media reports What People Are Saying along with whatever the latest pharma-funded study says the new wonder drug can do, and it snowballs.
Lately I’ve noticed an uptick in online doctors Creating Content about how Ozempic MIGHT BE a great treatment for all your other addictions and bad thoughts too. Which makes the Ozempic user’s story in the linked cbc article even more chilling imo: