A theory about Rob Ford's support base

[Glen]

Miller's government left Toronto with a surplus, afterall, so I don't see any massive budgeting problems here. But emotion rules the day in the world of reality, so gravy train it is. Especially in Etobicoke...

More Miller Math, Claiming a surplus after draining more than 3 billion from reserves.

 

[malvern2]

Well said archanfel, many people on this board act as if all South Asians or anyone who didnt vote Smitherman is homophobic, anti-diversity, and anti-urban. Thats not the case at all, people want change, and there were serious issues at city hall and a messege needed to be sent. Please respect the democratic process, its funny that people like to post on this forum about how much of an intolerant person i am for voting Ford spew some of the most toxic and uneducated comments.

 

[Coltaine79]

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/882747--rob-ford-s-surprisingly-big-tent

Terrific article above... someone who clearly sees that with such a huge percentage of Torontonians voted for Ford, it clearly wasn't about left vs right, or brown-skinned "redneck" immigrants who drive an F-150 and are named Bubba-khan, etc.

Perhaps your effort would be better spent trying to figure out why so many Torontonians have this misplaced sense of rage towards the municipal level of government rather than trying to use the election results as a way to get NDPers to jump on the anti-immigrant bandwagon?

Religious-based homophobia is a phenomenon of the Abrahamic religions - Christianity, Judaism, Islam.

The Eastern religions - Hinduism, Bhuddism, Taoism, Sikhism, etc. - have no rules against homosexuality.

So blaming the immigrants' religion for homophobia in Canada is just ridiculous.

Good point. India gave us ahimsa, Yoga, the Gautama Buddha, the kama sutra...

From the west we have National Socialism, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the Conquest of the New World... Dubya.

I can see why RC8/Danielinthecity/Coool want all of us darkies out!



Seriously though, I'm surprised none of you see the pattern in Coool's posts. *cough*stormfront*cough*

 

[GraphicMatt]

Perhaps your effort would be better spent trying to figure out why so many Torontonians have this misplaced sense of rage towards the municipal level of government rather than trying to use the election results as a way to get NDPers to jump on the anti-immigrant bandwagon?

Bingo.

Why did this administration become a symbol of everything wrong with government across the GTA? That's the question those in government and those that believe in government (ie. the left) need to think about for the next few years.

 

[Tewder]

Okay, so you're fed up with bigotry from Tamils and you're going to show just how much more sophisticated you are by...being bigoted? Come on.

I know that there are elements of South Asian culture that don't jive with our Western views on the rights of gay people, etc. but does that mean our reaction should be to shun or make pariahs of these groups? Probably not, because to do so we would be hypocrites.

So to have any value system at all is to be hypocritical? Nonsense. The issue is to be clear and unapolagetic about what the value system is. We don't have to make pariahs out of groups or out of anybody, but we can be intolerant of belief systems and practices that are incompatible with ours. This is only fair, to us and to anybody that would uproot their life to come here.

The best thing we can do collectively is promote a cultural ideal of Canada that is inclusive of everyone and successful because of it.

... but therein lays the seeds of this 'hypocrisy' that Hipster Duck speaks of. A cultural ideal is a value system, and how can any value system be inclusive of 'everyone' and everything? It can't, and this is where Canada trips up on its own ideology.

Thank god for Ford, in some respects. In his raw and clusmy way he shakes up the public discourse and in so doing frees it. His campaign alone has challenged us to ask ourselves, among other things, at what point can we as a society have a legitimate discussion about immigration, a society's need for population growth vs its ability to absorb sustained levels of newcommers, without the discussion devolving into empty and gratuitous accusations of racism? From my perspective the reaction to Ford on this issue reveals the intolerance, immaturity and basic inability of the so-called progressives to engage in responsible dialogue on these issues, and this is what most people in the city - immigrant or otherwise - find intolerant, and all the more so given that public discourse has been locked up in their control.

Nobody wants the likes of nfitz and the PC Police setting the rules of discussion for everybody else. Using the term 'Oriental' is not a crime and does not a racist make, and most Asian Canadians understand this. Talking about population growth, when immigration is a big part of this discussion in the GTA, does not make one a racist and most people of all backgrounds understand this.

 

[Brandon716]

Miller Math? It is math, plain and simple. Miller wasn't a perfect mayor, I didn't support Transit City except for Eglinton LRT. The entire rest of the system is an over-glorified streetcar system. But he did balance the budget, reserves or not.

 

[nfitz]

Nobody wants the likes of nfitz and the PC Police setting the rules of discussion for everybody else. Using the term 'Oriental' is not a crime and does not a racist make, and most Asian Canadians understand this.

Not once have I ever said that using the word "Oriental" makes one a racist.

Why do you keep making these slanderous statements?

I've called the use of word quaint ... hardly what you expect someone in their 30s to use. But not once did I ever call it racist.

 

[Admiral Beez]

The Eastern religions - Hinduism, Bhuddism, Taoism, Sikhism, etc. - have no rules against homosexuality.

To clarify, Buddhism is not a religion - to the Buddhist there is no god, no entity to worship. It's more a philosophy than anything else.

 

[Hipster Duck]

... but therein lays the seeds of this 'hypocrisy' that Hipster Duck speaks of. A cultural ideal is a value system, and how can any value system be inclusive of 'everyone' and everything? It can't, and this is where Canada trips up on its own ideology.

For starters, my notions of inclusivity are not informed by Canadian ideology or even being Canadian. I'm not an essentialist, nor someone who believes in absolute, inassailable truths, but there is something broadly applicable across humanity to the idea that one group should not be in a position to impose their cultural values on others. That runs the gamut from Islamofascism to Jehovah's Witnesses knocking on my door to the openly gay Pim Fortuyn scapegoating immigrants because the changing demographics somehow upsets the "progressive" nature of Liberal Democratic Holland. We are all guilty of this, and the best thing we can do is to just construct a society in which potentially offensive value impositions are kept to a minimum. People must accept that cultures are different, that there will be some degree of assimilation and cultural syncretism (usually after one generation) that they cannot force in the other direction, and that they have to live beside people who have potentially different value systems than them. It is also up to people from opposing cultural groups to find commonalities rather than points of contention - often a common threat will do this (for example, Aboriginal groups that beat each other over the head for 10,000 years banded together when they were being collectively and indiscriminately decimated by European colonization), but I think it is possible to find commonalities without a common pressure.

Reciprocating intolerance to intolerant groups, as Coool advocates, and as you are defending, leads us nowhere and is a genuinely hypocritical thing for someone who is a victim of historical intolerance (eg. a gay person) to say.

 

[Mystic Point]

The silent majority of the suburbs, perhaps. The areas of the city with higher densities all voted against him. In other words, those who have to experience living in the actual city of Toronto and not on driveways and walmarts far far away, would have much preferred having a different major.

It's sad that people who don't even really live in the city are now in charge of the city.

I know they say Scarboro, Etobicoke, North York etc are part of Toronto. They aren't really. Because these suburbs could be anywhere, Rochester, Austin, Cincinatti etc.

The suburbs surrounding Toronto are vast, faceless, generic. Why the city is going to be run by strangers from the suburbs is cruel.

 

[King of Kensington]

More akin to the San Fernando Valley I'd say...

 

[adma]

The support base: myth

reality

 

[doady]

It's sad that people who don't even really live in the city are now in charge of the city.

I think it's sad you don't consider many people who live in the city to be residents of the city.

To clarify, Buddhism is not a religion - to the Buddhist there is no god, no entity to worship. It's more a philosophy than anything else.

Er, okay. The bottom line is, there are people who identify their religion as Bhuddism and identify themselves as Bhuddist and regular visit Bhuddist temples, and these people don't base their lives around texts that tell them to kill gay people, unlike Christians.

 

[PinkLucy]

Unlike SOME Christian sects.

 

[drone]

Ford ain't even been sworn in yet...I imagine his track record in Etobicoke wasn't that bad, he served a couple of terms there.

Let's see what he does, as for his support base..it's alotta different people from different walks of life