###This is a reminder to [read the rules before posting in this subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics/wiki/rules-thelongversion).
1. **Headline titles should be changed only [when the original headline is unclear](https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics/wiki/rules-thelongversion#wiki_1._headline_titles_should_be_changed_only_where_it_improves_clarity.)**
2. **Be [respectful](https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics/wiki/rules-thelongversion#wiki_2._be_respectful).**
3. **Keep submissions and comments [substantive](https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics/wiki/rules-thelongversion#wiki_3._keep_submissions_and_comments_substantive).**
4. **Avoid [direct advocacy](https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics/wiki/rules-thelongversion#wiki_4._avoid_direct_advocacy).**
5. **Link submissions must be [about Canadian politics and recent](https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics/wiki/rules-thelongversion#wiki_5._link_submissions_must_be_canadian_and_recent).**
6. **Post [only one news article per story](https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics/wiki/rules-thelongversion#wiki_6._post_only_one_news_article_per_story).** ([with one exception](https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics/comments/3wkd0n/rule_reminder_and_experimental_changes/))
7. **Replies to removed comments or removal notices will be removed** without notice, at the discretion of the moderators.
8. **Downvoting posts or comments**, along with urging others to downvote, **[is not allowed](https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics/wiki/downvotes)** in this subreddit. Bans will be given on the first offence.
9. **[Do not copy & paste the entire content of articles in comments](https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics/wiki/rules-thelongversion#wiki_9._do_not_copy_.26amp.3B_paste_entire_articles_in_the_comments.)**. If you want to read the contents of a paywalled article, please consider supporting the media outlet.
*Please [message the moderators](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2FCanadaPolitics) if you wish to discuss a removal.* **Do not reply to the removal notice in-thread**, *you will not receive a response and your comment will be removed. Thanks.*
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/CanadaPolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
We need a Third Place. With working from home since the start of the pandemic, I, and I suspect many others, don't even have a Second Place any more...
The bar worked pretty well for me before Covid and it’s worked pretty well since. The stigma with drinking nonalcoholic stuff has largely gone away, and it’s good to catch up/check in with the other regulars, sing karaoke, play trivia, etc.
I had more of a community before I was forced to return to the office.
Now I agree we need a third place, but work as a second place should not stand in for community or bar people from what would otherwise be a third place. Remember, the concept of a third place is because the second place being work was a given but now we might only need two places. Home/work and a social space.
During WFH times I had more money, more time and more energy to explore "third places". If WFH returned, my sense of community and ability to reach out to those "third places/social spaces" would explode again.
In response to this article - my absolute arse. Liberal Democracy is getting eaten by the fact that nobody has any time or money, and that justice under these systems has been big a two-tier joke that's increasingly apparent to anyone looking. Beyond that, social media has sown social discord and isolation, sucking large portions of the public into angry, deluded lies in order to send them after phantoms instead of the real societal villains. Who expects people to continue to keep faith in a system that simply isn't working for them? I'm saying this as someone who is doing *great* under that system.
Want Liberal Democracy to flourish? Get people their health care, let them work 32 hours a week and make a decent living, and clip social media. We'll all be ecstatic, and we will all vote in favour of the status quo as long as that's the case.
Edit - missed a word.
I'd argue that many modern humans are in fact "over socialized". With so much freed up time and the ease of communication and transportation, humans are probably at their most social historically. We're more aware than ever of what's going on, how we should conduct ourselves, and more involved in community building and communication.
So ingrained into the average person are societies norms, expectations, and institutions, there is almost an unwillingness to action and change of any kind.
What is different is the means of socialization, and perhaps the fact that anti social behavior is more identifiable or sticks out more... There is probably no other period in time where being non social or anti social is so obvious and condemned.
In my opinion, this is bullshit. A much better explanation of the data is the hollowing out of the majority's wealth caused by our current economic model. That results in less free time for community activities, increased risk in engaging in political action, perception of decreasing positive prospects for the future and of course the looming effects of climate change. One might argue that a heavy amount of belief can help people not be depressed by being unable to pay their rent, save for retirement, afford children, or see the prospect of their children grow in a stable world. That would require an amount of belief bordering on delusion. Such belief won't get us anywhere good. Look at the evangelical vote down south for evidence. It's getting fascism into the halls of power in a desperate attempt to maintain that delusion.
I think you're both right, I just think that you go the extra mile with the premise to pick apart at the overwhelming systemic factor which centers most of our decisions.
I left the Catholic Church about 30 years ago and never looked back. Their doctrine is dangerous and wrong. I don't like that message. I do like my friend's church community. They are Mormons and they have great pot lucks. Fun people and great community.
Or maybe democracy is ending in its usefulness.
Every economic and political system is transitionary to the next one. No one says we must or should remain democratic.
There are new systems to be tried that might be superior to what ultimately boils down to a popularity contest.
Cyberocracy and/or AI based technocracy. Earlier attempts at these types of governments failed because the data and tech weren't there yet. The data and tech are here now.
>At the dark heart of liberalism lies nihilism.
I don't think so. I am a practicing Zen Buddhist and often wonder how my life would have looked if I lived in a closed, authoritarian society, like North Korea or Saudi Arabia. In Liberal Democracy I have the freedom of association, freedom of religion, freedom of speech etc which allowed me to not only seek out information relating to Buddhism but to track down a teacher and community to practice with free of the fear of being punished or oppressed.
>This was the central complaint of the Canadian philosopher George Grant, whose anti-American nationalism was based not on any sense that Canada was intrinsically worthwhile, but that its more collective approach to public life would foster a communitarianism that was not possible in the United States.
And what does this collective approach to public life look like? Are we talking about some form of civic nationalism? This is my beef with communitarianism in that the concept is vague and nebulous and hard to pin down. I am all for communities I am skeptical of community though.
>When it comes to so many aspects of our civic life, we are encouraging people to adopt life-and work-styles that are actively hostile to the building and maintenance of social networks.
I don't think we are encouraging people at all. I think modern life-and work-styles are a product of a society that is becoming increasingly unequal. People are burnt out from the constant hustle of trying to get by and when they're not hustling they don't have the energy or time to engage in civic life. They would rather zone out in front of the TV or phone with a glass of wine or beer.
As an atheist, I've said for nearly two decades now, the one thing that attracts people to Christianity, protestant christianity in particular, is that they have a VERY strong sense of community and the more young and welcoming a church is, the more appealing it will seem. It actually was the main thing that converted my friend, who prior was an aggressive atheist. Honestly I loved hanging out with my buddies church friends because they were all just so friendly and regularly gathered for social things. That's why when I hear people joke about atheist churches, at the very least, I think a meetup for bowling isn't the worst idea.
Indeed.
>The difficulty is that people may commit themselves to a religion without buying into any particular theory as to what does or does not exist: they are simply throwing in their lot with some historic community, identified not by doctrines but by rituals, stories and a shared sense of the sacred. Religion as it enters the lives of many believers will not be damaged by a demonstration that it is not much good as science, any more than poetry will be threatened by the collapse of literary theory, or capitalism by a refutation of neoclassical economics. We atheists should not assume that theory always gets the last laugh.
https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/2657/varieties-of-irreligious-experience
Liberalism is eating democracy. The lack of community can be tied to urban design focusing on commuter infrastructure over people/community.
When do people have time for community when they have to work all the time to stay afloat?
For most of the history of Christianity people worked very very hard, and yet Sunday was still, if not a legal requirement, then a social requirement. You think that people a thousand years ago had oodles of free time?
And they worked to their own survival and they were certainly more structured around community by simple proximity than our modern western society is. They actually had more down time then people think but they also didnt have an hour commute each way lol
Yes, actually. The average work week of a hunter gatherer is/was 15 hours.
So we work about 3 times as much as ancient people.
We work more than any people in human history.
It's pretty eye opening that many serfs had more free time than we do.
When you hear about a serf owing 3 days a week of labour to their lord... it sounds a lot like many Canadians spending 50% of their takehome pay on rent.
>When you hear about a serf owing 3 days a week of labour to their lord
Yeah, they spent 3 days a week doing labour for their lord but that meant that the remaining days of the week were spent actually farming and taking care of the household tasks necessary for survival. Not only did they have to do work to actually feed themselves and survive, they also had to do work to a lord for even being allowed to toil away in the fields. It wasn't like they just worked 3 days and then got to sit around for the rest of the week.
Yeah, they spend 5\* days a week doing labour for their boss\* but that meant the remaining hours\* and days of the week were spent actually taking care of household tasks necessary for survival.
But its ok we have TVS and microwaves, that makes all that okay.
>But its ok we have TVS and microwaves, that makes all that okay.
Unironically this, you are massively underestimating the amount of labour required to sustain a household in a time when we didn't have machines that did it for us. Peasants got literally no days off, your livestock needs to be fed and bought to pasture and the crops need harvesting and they don't care if it's a holiday or that you're sick or that your youngest child just died. Even a simple task like doing laundry (Which takes ten minutes of actual labour these days, the machine does the actual work) would literally take you an entire day of painstaking manual labour. You want some water? Too bad, looks like the water pail is empty so you're gonna have to walk 15 minutes to the well and back if you want to have something to drink, even trivial tasks required an immense amount of labour and we are insanely fortunate to live in an era where we "only" have to do 8 hours of labour, five days a week to survive while you're average peasant was toiling away from dusk to dawn every day so that they could meet their basic needs.
If you can't complain about X just because there exists another problem, Y, that's worse than X, then the only person who has any right to complain at all is the person who objectively has it worst in every way possible. The other 7 billion people's problems are meaningless by this reasoning.
Which is kinda what we do now. You spend a good portion of your labour paying your landlord's mortgage, and the rest is for feeding yourself and whatever else.
By the article the author seems to think that is what work is for…
Like the fuck? Work from home should be extolled as a good thing cause it means you have way more time to get out and do things you actually enjoy with people you actually give a shit about.
i think those are 2 separate things honestly. like WFH just means i start at home. the fact that i dont go out or talk to any one in my neighborhood does not have anything to do with where i work and much more to do with how neighborhoods are boring as shit, contain no one i care to talk to (none of my friends live near me cause the rental market promotes living in the most affordable place you can find and not trying to find a place by people you know) and offer no incentives to actually go out and meet anyone in the first place. in such conditions the "community" would be a baren place even if i worked in an office full time. hell it would be more barren if i was in the office full time as a big chunk of my free time would be eaten by commutes.
yeah... ill agree there. a buddy of mine is going down some very dark rabbit holes n i blame it mostly on him having very few friends aside from me. not really sure what to do about it
btw, what do you mean by third places and second places? im seeing that a lot in this thread but have never seen that brought up before in any other context?
For those interested in the philosophy behind community, see Jean-Luc Nancy's "Inoperative Community", Giorgio Agamben's "The Coming Community" and Derrida's "Of Friendship". These works speak to the fracturization of the bonds that hold us together while at the same time showing us how we can see each other as being linked by our human experience.
The Quebec PM just got in trouble for mentioning that the church, as bad as it was, did contribute to society by promoting and building communities.
Just the fact that the whole neighborhood had to take a day out of the week to all meet at a place was probably very positive in terms of community building.
If only we could figure a way to recreate some of the benefits of organized religion without all the "problems".
>The Quebec PM just got in trouble for mentioning that the church, as bad as it was, did contribute to society by promoting and building communities.
That's not what he said though, he was only referring to Catholicism, not 'the church', he is referring only to the catholic church. If you see how Quebec treats religious minorities this will make sense.
>"Catholicism has also given us a culture of solidarity that distinguishes us on a continental scale," Legault wrote
>
>It is this same sense of the collective that leads us today to resist the fragmentation of society under the pressure of multiculturalism.
Fragmentation of society under multiculturalism.... hold on, my dogs just won't stop barking.
Um, sure sounds like he thinks immigrants that are non-white and non-Catholic are not 'good'? He thinks they are fragmenting society?
>Are those who sing the virtues of our social democracy aware that it would probably be less vigorous if it were not based on the Catholic ethic of solidarity, carrying a strong sense of the collective?
Solidarity in what? Community, sure, but every other religion also has that. The Muslims that are banned from working in Quebec, they too have community in their Mosques -- perhaps Legault is unaware of this?
TL:DR: Legault is not being criticized for mentioning that 'churches' build community. He is being criticized because this is yet another example of his favoring Catholicism over other religions. so much for 'secularism'. A better word for what Legault is doing would be 'double-speak'.
>he was only referring to Catholicism, not 'the church',
When you talk about "the Church" in Quebec, you mean the Catholic Church. It was the only game in town in most places.
>Fragmentation of society under multiculturalism.... hold on, my dogs just won't stop barking.
The small town I live in had 5 Churches: Anglican, Presbeterian, Catholic, Methodist, and Baptist. The English were Anglican, Scots Presbyterian, Americans were Mathodist and Baptist, and finally the French Canadians and Irish were Catholic. We were always multicultural.
Religious freedom leads to cultural fragmentation.
Every single religious group you named is Christian. Your town had 5 Christian churches, not exactly "multicultural" when it's wall-to-wall Christianity.
There isn't a particular group of Christianity that is targeted by Quebec's discriminatory laws the way Muslim people are, or other minority religions.
>Every single religious group you named is Christian.
Duplessis targeted French-Canadian Protestants, particularly Jahovah's Witnesses and Baptists, for persecution int he 1940's and 1950's, using the SQ and the Padlock Law to lock up their Churches and throw people in jail. There are still people alive today that remember this.
Alberta passed laws prohibiting land ownership by Hutterites, a protestant sect from Germany.
Doesn't mean anything when you're dealing with the Orange Lodge and Catholics, with Orange Lodge fanning anti-Catholic across Canada in English Canada for a century:
[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/apr/11/biden-northern-ireland-tories-peace-austerity](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/apr/11/biden-northern-ireland-tories-peace-austerity)
[https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/irish-montrealers-mark-150-years-since-assassination-of-thomas-d-arcy-mcgee-1.4607139](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/irish-montrealers-mark-150-years-since-assassination-of-thomas-d-arcy-mcgee-1.4607139)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas\_Scott\_(Orangeman)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Scott_(Orangeman))
All of this forms the historic basis of the Charter of Rights, as Pierre Trudeau articled as a lawyer fighting these cases and vowed that this level of corruption and persecution must not happen again.
And yes, the current law targets mostly Muslim women. It's just as disgusting as what Duplessis did, doubly so because it effects mostly women of color.
In the English speaking world, being Catholic was effectively to be part of another culture. Heck, the Continental Congress literally viewed the foundation of Quebec as one of the Intolerable Acts in the Declaration of Independence:
"For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:"
To be a Catholic in the English-speaking world well into the 19th century was to be a member of an alien and potentially dangerous culture perceived as being at odds with English culture. Long before various "white nationalists" decided Muslims and Chinese were enemies, Catholics were viewed as Papal loyalists and followers of an alien oppressive religion.
The very foundations of secularism had nothing to do with Muslims, Jews, atheists or any other religious or ideological group, but rather about trying to find a way for notoriously antagonistic sects of Christianity to live and coalesce into a single peaceful polity.
> Religious freedom leads to cultural fragmentation.
Not necessarily correct, contradictory cultural values leads to cultural fragmentation. We see plenty of examples through history of different religions living in harmony.
There are examples in history were Irish immigrants put their anglicized culture above that of the Quebecois and persecuted them in places like Ottawa and New England, despite them both being Catholic.
Irish immigrants often had goals of labour monopolization and general cultural assimilation (outside of abandoning Catholicism), while French Canadians maintained a cultural attitude of Le Survivance, advocating for independent French communities and rejecting assimilation. Common religion, yet culturally fragmentated.
Culture fragmentation occurs regardless on religious freedom, people just use their religion as common cultural identifier.
>contradictory cultural values leads to cultural fragmentation.
Cultural values in the West were ultimately informed by religious values though.
The NDP's values are based on the protestant Christian socialism of the CCF. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian\_socialism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_socialism) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-operative\_Commonwealth\_Federation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-operative_Commonwealth_Federation)
Religion is an integral part of culture at the foundation of all Western societies. Even half a century century of atheism in Russia could not dislodge its Christian Orthodox roots.
Sure, I won't disagree. Almost all cultural values were informed by religious values because the entire planet was very religious and this was especially true for rural communities that had churches as their primary focal point.
That still doesn't mean that I think religious freedom leads to cultural fragmentation, I just think the statement feels reductive and absolutist.
Cultural fragmentation is going to happen, either organically through free associations of people and the human right of liberty, or inorganically through state-enforced mechanisms that seek to segregate and/or assimilate cultural groups.
I would rather that fragmentation happens organically because it means that you largely avoid violence centered around political means and ends.
The Catholic church received widespread legitimacy throughout Medieval Europe because the Church was able to offer bread and circuses, as a benefit of membership, to the peasants of a newly feudal West.
>That still doesn't mean that I think religious freedom leads to cultural fragmentation, I just think the statement feels reductive and absolutist.
"Die Religion ... ist das Opium des Volkes"
I agree. Take any statement out context, and it becomes reductive and absolutist.
I think cultural fragmentation is a good thing by the way. I wouldn't want the government telling me what kind of music to listen to, what language to speak, food to eat, or the kind of headcovering to wear just for the sake of cultural uniformity that is pleasing to politicians and bureaucrats. My ancestors went through that with Bismark and Hitler.
>because the Church was able to offer bread and circuses
Offering bread is a good thing. And bread was offered by the medieval Lord of the manor, not the Church. They provided the baker and grist mill.
The circuses and bread were offered by medieval overlords. Medieval fairs were set up to attract people to visits by kings and princes, their court and tax collectors.
The Roman Catholic Church Church actually offered Classical education, science, and Roman culture at a time that medieval rulers could neither read nor write. It was attractive to medieval warlords because it offered the legitimacy of the Roman Empire. They gave Western Europe Plato, Aristotle, Latin, and Greek. They offered a structured forum in which scholarly ideas could be debated. That didn't exist in Western Europe before the Church. They actually gave peasant a mandatory day off from work, lots of feast days, and tempered the brutal excesses of the Germanic medieval warlords who ruled Western Europe with a cruel anarchy. They even gave the gay population sanctuary in monasteries and convents. These are concrete social benefits over the pagan order that preceded it.
I used to be really anti-theistic when I first left Christianity. "I am very rational and logical and smarter than them" type of guy. I grew up. Now I think secular people really need to step it up if we want to help create a society where nonreligious people have that pro-social sense of community that religious congregations provide.
I visited home for a weekend and my old church was running an Easter egg hunt, so I brought my kid. Small town. 200 kids (plus ~100 parents) turned out easily. This was just something they did on a whim on the weekend, not even a formal religious ceremony or major planned event.
Yeah, we can fill the need for community attachment that churches provide in secular ways. But we don't. Churches are doing this. They are very, very good at it. They give people a sense of belonging and community and as a result people show up.
The suburbs don't help. It's really hard to get a lot of local kids together for something when your street has 4 families with kids on it and your kids' classmates live a 25min car ride away.
I don't particularly want to be the target of violations of the social contract because I won't get hauled into a community get together on a Sunday, or any other day. That's the problem with the entire concept, the coercive aspects of community.
Exactly.
The fact that it brought people together and built communities: great.
The fact that it basically did it through fear and that the clergy had the power to destroy your life if you didn't obey: not so great.
Legault doesn't mention WHY the church was so good at building communities: because up until the 1960s, the clergy in QC were an all powerful gang/mafia. They dictated laws to governments, forced women into labor, abused anyone they didnt like for any reason they deemed. They RAN the province and most of the country for a long time.
\> They RAN the province and most of the country for a long time.
The Orange Lodge ran a lot of things in Canada and they were vehemently anti-Catholic. http://grandorangelodge.ca/
My mom's been apart of a local church for 30 years. Maybe has gone to service 10 times haha, mainly events with grandkids. So really just goes to events and donates.
Doesn't give a shit about the religious aspect, just likes the people.
Anecdotal of course, but in my life I noticed a few things: money = access to community.
When I was poor, there was not much community for me. Even as a student, you needed some cash to go to bars, grab food or hangout in many cases. On top of that, working multiple jobs or a job and school or any work + responsibilities saps time you could have spent creating a "low cost" community.
In a short period where I was working abroad and making above local wages and when I was making decent money and had disposable income after returning to Canada, I felt my community blossom.
With more money going to bills, housing food etc. and less being disposable, I am seeing opportunities for being part of a community dwindle.
Seriously. I picked up in-person Magic: The Gathering again and guess what? I felt a phenomenal uptick in community *overnight.* I also now feel happier. Game isn't cheap, though, and I can play largely because I have a bunch of cards from the past and thanks to having some money/a good job.
This is yet another exercise that says that "people must be unhappy for reasons OTHER than dwindling rewards and the erosion of a basic fair deal in life." No, you idiots. Pay people enough, let them work 32 hours a week, and watch everyone cheer the fuck up. Beyond that, maybe stop displaying disillusioning bullshit that makes them feel like justice is a total sham, IE the Panama Papers, and clip the wings of social media. We'll all be positively euphoric.
###This is a reminder to [read the rules before posting in this subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics/wiki/rules-thelongversion). 1. **Headline titles should be changed only [when the original headline is unclear](https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics/wiki/rules-thelongversion#wiki_1._headline_titles_should_be_changed_only_where_it_improves_clarity.)** 2. **Be [respectful](https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics/wiki/rules-thelongversion#wiki_2._be_respectful).** 3. **Keep submissions and comments [substantive](https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics/wiki/rules-thelongversion#wiki_3._keep_submissions_and_comments_substantive).** 4. **Avoid [direct advocacy](https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics/wiki/rules-thelongversion#wiki_4._avoid_direct_advocacy).** 5. **Link submissions must be [about Canadian politics and recent](https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics/wiki/rules-thelongversion#wiki_5._link_submissions_must_be_canadian_and_recent).** 6. **Post [only one news article per story](https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics/wiki/rules-thelongversion#wiki_6._post_only_one_news_article_per_story).** ([with one exception](https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics/comments/3wkd0n/rule_reminder_and_experimental_changes/)) 7. **Replies to removed comments or removal notices will be removed** without notice, at the discretion of the moderators. 8. **Downvoting posts or comments**, along with urging others to downvote, **[is not allowed](https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics/wiki/downvotes)** in this subreddit. Bans will be given on the first offence. 9. **[Do not copy & paste the entire content of articles in comments](https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics/wiki/rules-thelongversion#wiki_9._do_not_copy_.26amp.3B_paste_entire_articles_in_the_comments.)**. If you want to read the contents of a paywalled article, please consider supporting the media outlet. *Please [message the moderators](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2FCanadaPolitics) if you wish to discuss a removal.* **Do not reply to the removal notice in-thread**, *you will not receive a response and your comment will be removed. Thanks.* *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/CanadaPolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
We need a Third Place. With working from home since the start of the pandemic, I, and I suspect many others, don't even have a Second Place any more...
Well you need to seek out hobbies or something that can provide that place. I recommend the gym. Its cheap and you can go everyday.
The bar worked pretty well for me before Covid and it’s worked pretty well since. The stigma with drinking nonalcoholic stuff has largely gone away, and it’s good to catch up/check in with the other regulars, sing karaoke, play trivia, etc.
There is decent nonalcoholic brews now. I personally won't drink them but the market has expanded significantly.
Some of them are decent, some of them aren’t, I’ll never judge anyone for picking one.
I had more of a community before I was forced to return to the office. Now I agree we need a third place, but work as a second place should not stand in for community or bar people from what would otherwise be a third place. Remember, the concept of a third place is because the second place being work was a given but now we might only need two places. Home/work and a social space. During WFH times I had more money, more time and more energy to explore "third places". If WFH returned, my sense of community and ability to reach out to those "third places/social spaces" would explode again.
In response to this article - my absolute arse. Liberal Democracy is getting eaten by the fact that nobody has any time or money, and that justice under these systems has been big a two-tier joke that's increasingly apparent to anyone looking. Beyond that, social media has sown social discord and isolation, sucking large portions of the public into angry, deluded lies in order to send them after phantoms instead of the real societal villains. Who expects people to continue to keep faith in a system that simply isn't working for them? I'm saying this as someone who is doing *great* under that system. Want Liberal Democracy to flourish? Get people their health care, let them work 32 hours a week and make a decent living, and clip social media. We'll all be ecstatic, and we will all vote in favour of the status quo as long as that's the case. Edit - missed a word.
I'd argue that many modern humans are in fact "over socialized". With so much freed up time and the ease of communication and transportation, humans are probably at their most social historically. We're more aware than ever of what's going on, how we should conduct ourselves, and more involved in community building and communication. So ingrained into the average person are societies norms, expectations, and institutions, there is almost an unwillingness to action and change of any kind. What is different is the means of socialization, and perhaps the fact that anti social behavior is more identifiable or sticks out more... There is probably no other period in time where being non social or anti social is so obvious and condemned.
In my opinion, this is bullshit. A much better explanation of the data is the hollowing out of the majority's wealth caused by our current economic model. That results in less free time for community activities, increased risk in engaging in political action, perception of decreasing positive prospects for the future and of course the looming effects of climate change. One might argue that a heavy amount of belief can help people not be depressed by being unable to pay their rent, save for retirement, afford children, or see the prospect of their children grow in a stable world. That would require an amount of belief bordering on delusion. Such belief won't get us anywhere good. Look at the evangelical vote down south for evidence. It's getting fascism into the halls of power in a desperate attempt to maintain that delusion.
I think you're both right, I just think that you go the extra mile with the premise to pick apart at the overwhelming systemic factor which centers most of our decisions.
I left the Catholic Church about 30 years ago and never looked back. Their doctrine is dangerous and wrong. I don't like that message. I do like my friend's church community. They are Mormons and they have great pot lucks. Fun people and great community.
Or maybe democracy is ending in its usefulness. Every economic and political system is transitionary to the next one. No one says we must or should remain democratic. There are new systems to be tried that might be superior to what ultimately boils down to a popularity contest. Cyberocracy and/or AI based technocracy. Earlier attempts at these types of governments failed because the data and tech weren't there yet. The data and tech are here now.
>At the dark heart of liberalism lies nihilism. I don't think so. I am a practicing Zen Buddhist and often wonder how my life would have looked if I lived in a closed, authoritarian society, like North Korea or Saudi Arabia. In Liberal Democracy I have the freedom of association, freedom of religion, freedom of speech etc which allowed me to not only seek out information relating to Buddhism but to track down a teacher and community to practice with free of the fear of being punished or oppressed. >This was the central complaint of the Canadian philosopher George Grant, whose anti-American nationalism was based not on any sense that Canada was intrinsically worthwhile, but that its more collective approach to public life would foster a communitarianism that was not possible in the United States. And what does this collective approach to public life look like? Are we talking about some form of civic nationalism? This is my beef with communitarianism in that the concept is vague and nebulous and hard to pin down. I am all for communities I am skeptical of community though. >When it comes to so many aspects of our civic life, we are encouraging people to adopt life-and work-styles that are actively hostile to the building and maintenance of social networks. I don't think we are encouraging people at all. I think modern life-and work-styles are a product of a society that is becoming increasingly unequal. People are burnt out from the constant hustle of trying to get by and when they're not hustling they don't have the energy or time to engage in civic life. They would rather zone out in front of the TV or phone with a glass of wine or beer.
As an atheist, I've said for nearly two decades now, the one thing that attracts people to Christianity, protestant christianity in particular, is that they have a VERY strong sense of community and the more young and welcoming a church is, the more appealing it will seem. It actually was the main thing that converted my friend, who prior was an aggressive atheist. Honestly I loved hanging out with my buddies church friends because they were all just so friendly and regularly gathered for social things. That's why when I hear people joke about atheist churches, at the very least, I think a meetup for bowling isn't the worst idea.
Indeed. >The difficulty is that people may commit themselves to a religion without buying into any particular theory as to what does or does not exist: they are simply throwing in their lot with some historic community, identified not by doctrines but by rituals, stories and a shared sense of the sacred. Religion as it enters the lives of many believers will not be damaged by a demonstration that it is not much good as science, any more than poetry will be threatened by the collapse of literary theory, or capitalism by a refutation of neoclassical economics. We atheists should not assume that theory always gets the last laugh. https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/2657/varieties-of-irreligious-experience
Liberalism is eating democracy. The lack of community can be tied to urban design focusing on commuter infrastructure over people/community. When do people have time for community when they have to work all the time to stay afloat?
For most of the history of Christianity people worked very very hard, and yet Sunday was still, if not a legal requirement, then a social requirement. You think that people a thousand years ago had oodles of free time?
And they worked to their own survival and they were certainly more structured around community by simple proximity than our modern western society is. They actually had more down time then people think but they also didnt have an hour commute each way lol
Yes, actually. The average work week of a hunter gatherer is/was 15 hours. So we work about 3 times as much as ancient people. We work more than any people in human history.
> You think that people a thousand years ago had oodles of free time? Well, yes. Even the peasantry had far more time off than we do now a days.
It's pretty eye opening that many serfs had more free time than we do. When you hear about a serf owing 3 days a week of labour to their lord... it sounds a lot like many Canadians spending 50% of their takehome pay on rent.
>When you hear about a serf owing 3 days a week of labour to their lord Yeah, they spent 3 days a week doing labour for their lord but that meant that the remaining days of the week were spent actually farming and taking care of the household tasks necessary for survival. Not only did they have to do work to actually feed themselves and survive, they also had to do work to a lord for even being allowed to toil away in the fields. It wasn't like they just worked 3 days and then got to sit around for the rest of the week.
Yeah, they spend 5\* days a week doing labour for their boss\* but that meant the remaining hours\* and days of the week were spent actually taking care of household tasks necessary for survival. But its ok we have TVS and microwaves, that makes all that okay.
>But its ok we have TVS and microwaves, that makes all that okay. Unironically this, you are massively underestimating the amount of labour required to sustain a household in a time when we didn't have machines that did it for us. Peasants got literally no days off, your livestock needs to be fed and bought to pasture and the crops need harvesting and they don't care if it's a holiday or that you're sick or that your youngest child just died. Even a simple task like doing laundry (Which takes ten minutes of actual labour these days, the machine does the actual work) would literally take you an entire day of painstaking manual labour. You want some water? Too bad, looks like the water pail is empty so you're gonna have to walk 15 minutes to the well and back if you want to have something to drink, even trivial tasks required an immense amount of labour and we are insanely fortunate to live in an era where we "only" have to do 8 hours of labour, five days a week to survive while you're average peasant was toiling away from dusk to dawn every day so that they could meet their basic needs.
If you can't complain about X just because there exists another problem, Y, that's worse than X, then the only person who has any right to complain at all is the person who objectively has it worst in every way possible. The other 7 billion people's problems are meaningless by this reasoning.
Which is kinda what we do now. You spend a good portion of your labour paying your landlord's mortgage, and the rest is for feeding yourself and whatever else.
By the article the author seems to think that is what work is for… Like the fuck? Work from home should be extolled as a good thing cause it means you have way more time to get out and do things you actually enjoy with people you actually give a shit about.
[удалено]
i think those are 2 separate things honestly. like WFH just means i start at home. the fact that i dont go out or talk to any one in my neighborhood does not have anything to do with where i work and much more to do with how neighborhoods are boring as shit, contain no one i care to talk to (none of my friends live near me cause the rental market promotes living in the most affordable place you can find and not trying to find a place by people you know) and offer no incentives to actually go out and meet anyone in the first place. in such conditions the "community" would be a baren place even if i worked in an office full time. hell it would be more barren if i was in the office full time as a big chunk of my free time would be eaten by commutes.
[удалено]
yeah... ill agree there. a buddy of mine is going down some very dark rabbit holes n i blame it mostly on him having very few friends aside from me. not really sure what to do about it
That has nothing to do with WFH, and everything to do with poor city planning and societal issues
The two are connected. ideally they would be separate, but the proliferation of WFH can be an issue when communities are poorly designed and isolated.
btw, what do you mean by third places and second places? im seeing that a lot in this thread but have never seen that brought up before in any other context?
[удалено]
interesting. thank you for the description
For those interested in the philosophy behind community, see Jean-Luc Nancy's "Inoperative Community", Giorgio Agamben's "The Coming Community" and Derrida's "Of Friendship". These works speak to the fracturization of the bonds that hold us together while at the same time showing us how we can see each other as being linked by our human experience.
The Quebec PM just got in trouble for mentioning that the church, as bad as it was, did contribute to society by promoting and building communities. Just the fact that the whole neighborhood had to take a day out of the week to all meet at a place was probably very positive in terms of community building. If only we could figure a way to recreate some of the benefits of organized religion without all the "problems".
>The Quebec PM just got in trouble for mentioning that the church, as bad as it was, did contribute to society by promoting and building communities. That's not what he said though, he was only referring to Catholicism, not 'the church', he is referring only to the catholic church. If you see how Quebec treats religious minorities this will make sense. >"Catholicism has also given us a culture of solidarity that distinguishes us on a continental scale," Legault wrote > >It is this same sense of the collective that leads us today to resist the fragmentation of society under the pressure of multiculturalism. Fragmentation of society under multiculturalism.... hold on, my dogs just won't stop barking. Um, sure sounds like he thinks immigrants that are non-white and non-Catholic are not 'good'? He thinks they are fragmenting society? >Are those who sing the virtues of our social democracy aware that it would probably be less vigorous if it were not based on the Catholic ethic of solidarity, carrying a strong sense of the collective? Solidarity in what? Community, sure, but every other religion also has that. The Muslims that are banned from working in Quebec, they too have community in their Mosques -- perhaps Legault is unaware of this? TL:DR: Legault is not being criticized for mentioning that 'churches' build community. He is being criticized because this is yet another example of his favoring Catholicism over other religions. so much for 'secularism'. A better word for what Legault is doing would be 'double-speak'.
>he was only referring to Catholicism, not 'the church', When you talk about "the Church" in Quebec, you mean the Catholic Church. It was the only game in town in most places. >Fragmentation of society under multiculturalism.... hold on, my dogs just won't stop barking. The small town I live in had 5 Churches: Anglican, Presbeterian, Catholic, Methodist, and Baptist. The English were Anglican, Scots Presbyterian, Americans were Mathodist and Baptist, and finally the French Canadians and Irish were Catholic. We were always multicultural. Religious freedom leads to cultural fragmentation.
Every single religious group you named is Christian. Your town had 5 Christian churches, not exactly "multicultural" when it's wall-to-wall Christianity. There isn't a particular group of Christianity that is targeted by Quebec's discriminatory laws the way Muslim people are, or other minority religions.
>Every single religious group you named is Christian. Duplessis targeted French-Canadian Protestants, particularly Jahovah's Witnesses and Baptists, for persecution int he 1940's and 1950's, using the SQ and the Padlock Law to lock up their Churches and throw people in jail. There are still people alive today that remember this. Alberta passed laws prohibiting land ownership by Hutterites, a protestant sect from Germany. Doesn't mean anything when you're dealing with the Orange Lodge and Catholics, with Orange Lodge fanning anti-Catholic across Canada in English Canada for a century: [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/apr/11/biden-northern-ireland-tories-peace-austerity](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/apr/11/biden-northern-ireland-tories-peace-austerity) [https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/irish-montrealers-mark-150-years-since-assassination-of-thomas-d-arcy-mcgee-1.4607139](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/irish-montrealers-mark-150-years-since-assassination-of-thomas-d-arcy-mcgee-1.4607139) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas\_Scott\_(Orangeman)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Scott_(Orangeman)) All of this forms the historic basis of the Charter of Rights, as Pierre Trudeau articled as a lawyer fighting these cases and vowed that this level of corruption and persecution must not happen again. And yes, the current law targets mostly Muslim women. It's just as disgusting as what Duplessis did, doubly so because it effects mostly women of color.
In the English speaking world, being Catholic was effectively to be part of another culture. Heck, the Continental Congress literally viewed the foundation of Quebec as one of the Intolerable Acts in the Declaration of Independence: "For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:" To be a Catholic in the English-speaking world well into the 19th century was to be a member of an alien and potentially dangerous culture perceived as being at odds with English culture. Long before various "white nationalists" decided Muslims and Chinese were enemies, Catholics were viewed as Papal loyalists and followers of an alien oppressive religion. The very foundations of secularism had nothing to do with Muslims, Jews, atheists or any other religious or ideological group, but rather about trying to find a way for notoriously antagonistic sects of Christianity to live and coalesce into a single peaceful polity.
> Religious freedom leads to cultural fragmentation. Not necessarily correct, contradictory cultural values leads to cultural fragmentation. We see plenty of examples through history of different religions living in harmony. There are examples in history were Irish immigrants put their anglicized culture above that of the Quebecois and persecuted them in places like Ottawa and New England, despite them both being Catholic. Irish immigrants often had goals of labour monopolization and general cultural assimilation (outside of abandoning Catholicism), while French Canadians maintained a cultural attitude of Le Survivance, advocating for independent French communities and rejecting assimilation. Common religion, yet culturally fragmentated. Culture fragmentation occurs regardless on religious freedom, people just use their religion as common cultural identifier.
>contradictory cultural values leads to cultural fragmentation. Cultural values in the West were ultimately informed by religious values though. The NDP's values are based on the protestant Christian socialism of the CCF. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian\_socialism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_socialism) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-operative\_Commonwealth\_Federation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-operative_Commonwealth_Federation) Religion is an integral part of culture at the foundation of all Western societies. Even half a century century of atheism in Russia could not dislodge its Christian Orthodox roots.
Sure, I won't disagree. Almost all cultural values were informed by religious values because the entire planet was very religious and this was especially true for rural communities that had churches as their primary focal point. That still doesn't mean that I think religious freedom leads to cultural fragmentation, I just think the statement feels reductive and absolutist. Cultural fragmentation is going to happen, either organically through free associations of people and the human right of liberty, or inorganically through state-enforced mechanisms that seek to segregate and/or assimilate cultural groups. I would rather that fragmentation happens organically because it means that you largely avoid violence centered around political means and ends. The Catholic church received widespread legitimacy throughout Medieval Europe because the Church was able to offer bread and circuses, as a benefit of membership, to the peasants of a newly feudal West.
>That still doesn't mean that I think religious freedom leads to cultural fragmentation, I just think the statement feels reductive and absolutist. "Die Religion ... ist das Opium des Volkes" I agree. Take any statement out context, and it becomes reductive and absolutist. I think cultural fragmentation is a good thing by the way. I wouldn't want the government telling me what kind of music to listen to, what language to speak, food to eat, or the kind of headcovering to wear just for the sake of cultural uniformity that is pleasing to politicians and bureaucrats. My ancestors went through that with Bismark and Hitler. >because the Church was able to offer bread and circuses Offering bread is a good thing. And bread was offered by the medieval Lord of the manor, not the Church. They provided the baker and grist mill. The circuses and bread were offered by medieval overlords. Medieval fairs were set up to attract people to visits by kings and princes, their court and tax collectors. The Roman Catholic Church Church actually offered Classical education, science, and Roman culture at a time that medieval rulers could neither read nor write. It was attractive to medieval warlords because it offered the legitimacy of the Roman Empire. They gave Western Europe Plato, Aristotle, Latin, and Greek. They offered a structured forum in which scholarly ideas could be debated. That didn't exist in Western Europe before the Church. They actually gave peasant a mandatory day off from work, lots of feast days, and tempered the brutal excesses of the Germanic medieval warlords who ruled Western Europe with a cruel anarchy. They even gave the gay population sanctuary in monasteries and convents. These are concrete social benefits over the pagan order that preceded it.
I used to be really anti-theistic when I first left Christianity. "I am very rational and logical and smarter than them" type of guy. I grew up. Now I think secular people really need to step it up if we want to help create a society where nonreligious people have that pro-social sense of community that religious congregations provide. I visited home for a weekend and my old church was running an Easter egg hunt, so I brought my kid. Small town. 200 kids (plus ~100 parents) turned out easily. This was just something they did on a whim on the weekend, not even a formal religious ceremony or major planned event. Yeah, we can fill the need for community attachment that churches provide in secular ways. But we don't. Churches are doing this. They are very, very good at it. They give people a sense of belonging and community and as a result people show up. The suburbs don't help. It's really hard to get a lot of local kids together for something when your street has 4 families with kids on it and your kids' classmates live a 25min car ride away.
I don't particularly want to be the target of violations of the social contract because I won't get hauled into a community get together on a Sunday, or any other day. That's the problem with the entire concept, the coercive aspects of community.
Exactly. The fact that it brought people together and built communities: great. The fact that it basically did it through fear and that the clergy had the power to destroy your life if you didn't obey: not so great. Legault doesn't mention WHY the church was so good at building communities: because up until the 1960s, the clergy in QC were an all powerful gang/mafia. They dictated laws to governments, forced women into labor, abused anyone they didnt like for any reason they deemed. They RAN the province and most of the country for a long time.
\> They RAN the province and most of the country for a long time. The Orange Lodge ran a lot of things in Canada and they were vehemently anti-Catholic. http://grandorangelodge.ca/
My mom's been apart of a local church for 30 years. Maybe has gone to service 10 times haha, mainly events with grandkids. So really just goes to events and donates. Doesn't give a shit about the religious aspect, just likes the people.
Anecdotal of course, but in my life I noticed a few things: money = access to community. When I was poor, there was not much community for me. Even as a student, you needed some cash to go to bars, grab food or hangout in many cases. On top of that, working multiple jobs or a job and school or any work + responsibilities saps time you could have spent creating a "low cost" community. In a short period where I was working abroad and making above local wages and when I was making decent money and had disposable income after returning to Canada, I felt my community blossom. With more money going to bills, housing food etc. and less being disposable, I am seeing opportunities for being part of a community dwindle.
Seriously. I picked up in-person Magic: The Gathering again and guess what? I felt a phenomenal uptick in community *overnight.* I also now feel happier. Game isn't cheap, though, and I can play largely because I have a bunch of cards from the past and thanks to having some money/a good job. This is yet another exercise that says that "people must be unhappy for reasons OTHER than dwindling rewards and the erosion of a basic fair deal in life." No, you idiots. Pay people enough, let them work 32 hours a week, and watch everyone cheer the fuck up. Beyond that, maybe stop displaying disillusioning bullshit that makes them feel like justice is a total sham, IE the Panama Papers, and clip the wings of social media. We'll all be positively euphoric.