My sympathies to you all. It's long been obvious to me what this place has been for quite some time now. Viewed from this side of the border, it's mostly what I'd expect to see hereabouts at, oh, freedominion.com, and you can imagine what that place modelled itself on.
The misogyny is just one bit of it. The blind raging stupid vindictiveness (criminal justice issues) and overwhelming me-firstism (any economic justice or, say, speech issue) are every bit as bad as the multifaceted bigotry that oozes out on any imaginable social justice / equality issue.
Classical liberalism. What the rest of the world calls far right-wing.
We're likely about to embark on our own federal election up herein the very near future. And likely to be facing another Conservative Party government, perhaps even a majority government this time. If we had nicer neighbours, this right-wing filth might never have gained legitimacy here. ;)
Just some interesting if depressing background on your current situation -- do read the entire thing:
http://erg.environics.net/media_room/default.asp?aID=456Here, father doesn't know best
The Globe and Mail,
Wednesday, July 4, 2001
... Nearly 20 years ago, my colleagues at Environics in Toronto and CROP in Montreal began a study of Canadian social values. In our first survey of Canadian values in 1983, we asked Canadians if they strongly or somewhat agreed or disagreed that: "The father of the family must be the master in his own house." We posed more than 100 such questions to respondents that year. Our intention was to track these 100 items over time, dropping some, adding others; we hoped we'd measure what was important to Canadians or what was changing in our values and perspectives on life.
The "father must be master" question has become legendary at Environics. We love it because it measures a traditional, patriarchal attitude to authority in our most cherished institution: the family. ...
... Every year thereafter a smaller proportion of Canadians agreed. By 1992, the year before Kim Campbell became our first female prime minister, only 26 per cent of Canadians still said dad should be on top -- a drop of 16 per cent in less than nine years. Our colleagues in France had been tracking this question since 1975 and they, too, were finding the same kind of systematic decline in the preference for patriarchal authority. So, too, in other European countries.
<Cdn figures steadily declined after 1992.>
... Meanwhile, we found that where 42 per cent of Americans believed the father should be master in 1992, the number increased to 44 per cent in 1996. We wondered if this was a statistical anomaly. We went back into the field in 2000 to find out if the frontal assault on patriarchal authority by U.S. president Bill Clinton and television icon Homer Simpson would bring U.S. numbers more into line with those in Canada and France.
This time <2000>, 48 per cent of Americans said the father of the family must be master in his own home; 51 per cent disagreed and 1 per cent had no opinion. We were stunned.
The U.S. really is the most backwardly patriarchal society among the western industrialized nations. And to all appearances, getting worse instead of better.
Seems like the kind of thing one would expect DU and DUers to be actively combatting ... and I can only imagine how distressing and depressing it is to see the opposite happening.
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