And this was my point. The party is focusing on plastic straws rather than other issues.
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“I just want to say one word to you… just one word… are you listening? Plastics.”
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I was in the US of A last week. Apart from one lady in a Trump 24 shirt, I barely saw any sort of political advertising.
You must not have gone to a purple state like ours. Can’t go anywhere without seeing an ad. The TV ads are the worst.
Sometimes I just want to open our window and scream (like in the movie Network) " I am mad as hell. I can’t take it anymore."
Most of the races this November.
The Presidential race in 7 states is the notable exception.
The SMS spam I’m getting because someone put my phone number on a list of Pennsylvanian numbers is horrible.
Although I did get my first SMS spam for my local Congressional race. It’s non-competitive, but apparently the MAGA guy has a budget / I forgot to disaffiliate from the GOP after the primary.
BC Conservatives finally came out with their policy platform (after advance voting has been going on for a week and after a record turnout at the advance voting).
Their education plan sounds like something from certain US states: a plan to remove all classroom material “that instills guilt based on ethnicity, nationality or religion.” Basically that means not telling students the truth about the historically terrible treatment of our Indigenous people.
There’s an easy fix to this. Don’t talk about how anyone is responsible. Talk about how the government is responsible as a separate entity.
My responsibility is limited to voting for govts who will negotiate and work with fn’s in a manner I agree with.
I do think there’s some tendency to somehow lay blame on individuals, and the right wing response is always ‘i didn’t do anything, and it was a different time’. Laying blame on the govt is both correct, and circumvents those arguments I think.
Or telling them that Normal schools were fun places to attend, sort of like a sleepover summer camp. I use that analogy because Laura Ingraham described the detention of immigrant children away from their parents that way.
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I think you just tell the full and truthful history and let people decide. I would add that the churches largely ran the residential schools and there was much abuse.
I thought I was pretty conversant with our Indigenous history from the work I have done with their community. However I had a mandatory three hour Indigenous reconciliation session with my employer this morning given by a hereditary chief of the Comox nation and he revealed much I did not know. It was tough to hear. I don’t feel personally responsible but am still motivated to try to help even more.
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There’s a really good 12 week course on Coursera on Indigenous Canada. It gets into a lot of it. I did school in BC in the 80s and 90s and it didn’t do a good job of addressing a lot of what happened. It mostly got ignored.
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I took a bunch of courses, I’m indigenous awareness certified. And I actually read as much of the trc reports as I can stand - it’s brutal, but I feel like pretty much nobody actually reads them.
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It has gotten much better now. My grandkids are 17 and 20 and they got extensively educated on Indigenous and environmental issues in the Vancouver school system. That could change if the Conservatives win Saturday’s election.
Same here. HS in the early to mid 90s and it was basically never mentioned.
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Catholic church ran everything in Quebec until the 60s. They ran the school system and they did many bad things over the years, including sexually assaulting thousands of kids. There’s a reason why Quebec went form super religious to atheist over the last 60 years. The Quebec gov has always resisted investigating fully the abuse, so we don’t know the full story.
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There’s a reason that Roman Catholic terms form the basis for Québecois profanity. (Short NSFW song that will confuse religious francophones unfamiliar with Québec sacres.)
More than 28% of British Columbia’s eligible voters have voted in advance of today’s election. Wonder how that level of advance voting compares with the US Presidential elections.
Good thing there has been high advance voting here as we are being pummelled by an atmospheric river today that is going to depress voting.
GA website is showing 2.7M out of 4.0M voted early in 2020.
So about 38% of eligible voters voted early…
57.3% turn out plus the numbers given above.
That site suggests that:
2,694,763 voted early
1,320,154 voted successfully by mail
Wikipedia has total votes cast as 4,999,960…so 985,043 voted in-person on election day?
Presumably there’s a little bit of distortion due to the pandemic, even in Georgia.
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Wow, that is very interesting.
We get a lower turnout in provincial elections versus federal elections so only about 50% of eligible voters will probably vote in today’s election. If that stands up then 56% ( 28/50) of our votes cast will be early voters. I thought that was very high but Georgia is very impressive.