07-12-2021, 06:51 AM
(07-11-2021, 11:39 PM)ac3r Wrote:(07-11-2021, 09:47 PM)danbrotherston Wrote: But that's the thing...most Americans were sane and rational too. ANYONE is susceptible to cult-like brainwashing if the right propaganda is applied. And the same monied interests that have been active in the US exist here also. We're just 30 years behind the US, and technology can accelerate that timeline.
We'll be out of the pandemic by then...but it's still a real risk. Keeping our policies and our parties and our politics away from that should be a top priority. It's a shame that we didn't reform our electoral system, as that would have been a significant step towards that.
America was never sane. It has always been the land of the dumb. The dumb ones got lucky because their biggest foreign adversaries managed to install a washed up, trashy ex-reality TV star as president and it empowered the most insane segments of their society to crawl out of their caves and act like the hateful, moronic racists they always have been. But we are extremely unlikely to venture down that path.
I can't help but feel you're taking a fairly pessimistic view here by saying we're 30 years behind them too. Canada is Canada...we are not the USA. Too many things allow us to differentiate ourselves from them. I don't think Canadians are susceptible to a con on the level we witnessed down south. We can't be compared to them. We can't even be compared to the UK which got Boris Johnson. We're simply not as stupid as they are, in my opinion. The closest we have to Trump is Maxine Bernier who started his own far-right party only to do so bad in the polls that he lost his own seat to a more moderate conservative because he was so repulsive.
Yeah anyone can fall for propaganda indeed, but it would be incredibly hard to achieve that sort of populist BS up here. We're incredibly diverse. Our voting laws and system ensure we don't suffer from gerrymandering or other voter suppression tactics, so every vote truly counts in this country. Canadians value who they are as a nation and they value the benefits that being fairly progressive people enjoy. We don't have anything similar to American Exceptionalism engrained into our mentalities that makes us assume we're special nor do we have people making it harder to vote. Most of us look to our neighbours down south and feel nothing but perplexed by them. We have many problems here, but I don't think we have to worry about becoming anything like them in our generation. Our cultures - outside of things like media - are simply far too different thanks to our education and way of life. It's one thing to browse the internet and see hateful, regressive comments from Canadian people and assume that there's a lot of them out there, but that doesn't truly represent the majority. Social media acts like a giant echo chamber that seemingly amplifies such voices, but most of us don't think like that.
I think this is foolish. We are the same human beings as in the US, one species, there is nothing superior about people who live here vs. the other side of a political line on a map.
Our policies and institutions are what mean we have different results, but those institutions and policies can change. Our voting laws absolutely do suffer from serious issues. Our education system is very good, but you'll note it's often a target of conservative policies, so that can change. Social media is more than an echo chamber, it actively changes people's positions (just like advertising) and it can push people into brainwashing. Whether we like the echo chamber or not, MOST people in Canada DO participate in social media, and like I said, we are the same species as in the US, we are just as susceptible to the algorithms FB employs. We certainly have had no more inoculation against them than anyone else (and this is an example which can be found much more broadly than the US).
Ultimately, only by facing the risks honestly and talking about the implications of changes in our society (like social media, or our electoral system, or our education system) can we avoid the situation the US is in. The US is also a large diverse country.
Oh...and we really do have a "Canadian Exceptionalism" ethos...it's the belief (rightly or wrongly) that we are better than the Americans.