R G Tomas

Festina lente.

RT/Likes don't = endorsement.

Views are my own or possibly borrowed from someone else.

[R G Tomas @rgthomasca]

@NovusOrdoWatch He just needs to do the tawhid finger

[R G Tomas @rgthomasca]

@AncapHeretic @ZubyMusic @Miss_Snuffy Exactly! Look how it worked with murder laws. People still die every year.

[John Carter @martianwyrdlord]

We need to have a serious conversation about Canada's culture of aggressively resentful mediocrity, which is encouraged by the Laurentians as it helps prop up the rentier feudalism of Canada's moribund political economy.

Success is punished. Ambition is castigated. Achievement goes unrewarded. No one is supposed to get above themselves, no one is allowed to reach for greatness.

In the Canadian system, you are expected to obtain permission for absolutely anything you want to do. Any success that isn't "success" bequeathed from the generous hand of Ottawa's commissars is immediately suspect, and will invariably be sabotaged. That pattern has persisted uninterrupted since Diefenbaker broke the aerospace industry. It's small-minded, small-town provincialism as an ethos of governance. Exhausted late-Soviet Brezhnevism laying like a choking fog over the land.

[R G Tomas @rgthomasca]

@Shalomi @ReinChange The Arabs seem to have to repeat the Nakba every few years just to be sure they lost.

[R G Tomas @rgthomasca]

@yogij66 @david_parker This is government so free groceries should actually increase the use of food banks.

[R G Tomas @rgthomasca]

@BadEconomicTake @NicD903 @TristinHopper Tashi has the same pronunciation but different orthography for she, he and it so you're both right

[Sciohn Fhanne @sciohn_fhanne]

I'll try to be very careful and sensitive with this observation of Canada, because it touches on highly charged questions of ethnicity, immigration, belonging, and public space.

But here goes.

I've walked around Mississauga's Celebration Square on multiple evenings, and one thing I've increasingly noticed is neither hostility, nor tension, nor conflict, but something more subtle and perhaps more concerning.

Public spaces seem to become associated with particular ethnocultural communities to such a degree that many others gradually stop showing up.

The result is not segregation in any formal sense. Nobody is being excluded. Nobody is being told they cannot be there. Yet the effect can be remarkably similar. A space that is nominally shared begins to feel less shared over time.

To be perfectly clear, what troubles me isn't the presence of any particular diasporic community itself per se, but rather the gradual disappearance of the sense that these spaces belong equally to all of us as Canadians.

When a public square begins to be perceived, fairly or unfairly, as belonging primarily to one group, many others instinctively withdraw. Older-stock Canadians withdraw. Other immigrant communities withdraw. East Asians withdraw. Eastern Europeans withdraw. People who have no objection to anyone there nevertheless begin spending their evenings elsewhere.

Human beings are, for better or worse, tribal creatures. We gravitate toward familiarity. We seek places where we feel represented. We retreat when that sense of belonging is lost.

I understand this instinctively as someone from an East Asian diasporic background myself.

The bottom line here is that a healthy Canadian civilization cannot simply consist of parallel communities inhabiting the same geography. It requires common spaces where people from different backgrounds routinely encounter one another and develop some sense of collective belonging within the same civic realm.

What I increasingly worry about in Canada is not "diversity" itself, but the erosion of sharedness.

A country begins to lose something important when its public spaces cease to feel genuinely collective.

And whatever future Canada ultimately chooses for itself, it should never, ever feel like a collection of separate worlds living side by side while gradually forgetting how to inhabit the same one.

[R G Tomas @rgthomasca]

@TristinHopper While "I grew up Muslim" usually proceeds a measure to deport terrorist sympathizers.

[R G Tomas @rgthomasca]

@aidenwpkenny It would have to be negotiated. Likely they would get something that they want and lose other things.

[R G Tomas @rgthomasca]

@kln3109 @AdamZivo Trans identified males is better imo for its clarity.

[R G Tomas @rgthomasca]

@terrynewman It looks like Regina!

[R G Tomas @rgthomasca]

@TristinHopper The under credentialed lack the rhetorical ability to make really stupid ideas sound plausible. "Instead of violating the rights of the unhoused let's just give them drugs so they don't overdose "

[R G Tomas @rgthomasca]

@JJ_McCullough @Wrestle_Paz I've seen similar at London Drugs in Regina. They act with impunity.

[R G Tomas @rgthomasca]

@mrdavidrowe @ryanburge I used to have one month contracts in cities before social media and I would ask the local church for a place to stay and one would be found (I paid as it was for work but clean, safe and affordable was otherwise hard to find in a strange city).

[R G Tomas @rgthomasca]

@RachelMoiselle This is precisely the situation in Canada: it isn't that everyone is a Hamas/Hezbollah supporter, rather it is that those who are voice their views with impunity.

[R G Tomas @rgthomasca]

@strabo_the_wise @JJ_McCullough It's a big deal on X but not such a big deal anywhere else.

[R G Tomas @rgthomasca]

@integralssn @CreesonAPTN The South Asian community is such an important part of our country's future yet we rarely hear about them in mainstream discourse.

[R G Tomas @rgthomasca]

@KoolSofa @AdamZivo They want to turn us into Fiji.

[R G Tomas @rgthomasca]

@CourtneyPFB @AdamZivo Calling for the purging of political theater is a policy position. Calling for the purging of people is Stalinism.

[R G Tomas @rgthomasca]

@JJ_McCullough Something that PET got right was the 1969 White Paper. He should have pushed through with it.