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Ah citing Wikipedia... that's a valid reference if there ever was one....
That was sorta my point. It's certainly as good a definition as the "local boys at the tavern" definitions of concepts we often see around here.
Quote:
Originally Posted by smakawhat
Ah... so you meant in the middle of the US... Ah I see..
I dig Minneapolis St. Paul area not sure how liberal minded the city is... it's traditionaly democract voting but has lately been a swing state. As for the city I didn't get much of a feel for the peoples mindset other than people there are heck of a lot nicer than other places in the US.
If you are asking about a liberal minded city/town in mid US I haven't spent much time in a lot of the cities/towns in that area. But the one place that totaly comes to mind though is Austin Texas.
San Francisco may sell itself as this liberal utopia, but it's stupidly exclusive and filled with limousine liberals. It's also not ethnicaly diverse at all in my opinion there's hardly any African Americans there what so ever. so how does that make it progressive???
SF isn't as "stupidly exclusive" as a lot of people make it out to be. Over 95,000 people, or 11.8% of the city's population is in poverty (which is barely lower than the national average of 13% ...and if poverty rates were adjusted for different locations/cost of living, which they aren't, you better be sure SF's rate would be higher, as would the rates for other cities)...point being, how do so many impoverished people, not to mention the working and middle class (which me and almost all of my friends and family in SF are a part of), survive in a city that's "stupidly exclusive?" It's not like you need to be millionaire to live here.
Also, since when did black population alone equal diversity? In SF there are about:
-250,000 Asian people (31% of SF's population. Groups with 5,000 or more people: Chinese, Filipino, vietnamese, korean, Japanese, and Indian),
-115,000 Latino people (14% of the pop. Groups with 5,000 or more people: Mexican, Salvadoran, Nicaraguan)
Non-hispanic white people make up 45% of SF's population. As far as black population, there are 55,000 black people in SF (around 7%), which is a whole lot more than "hardly any whatsoever." Oakland, which is 30% black, is literally next door too, not to mention there are other suburbs with high black populations as a percentage (SF has the highest raw numbers of black residents in the Bay Area anyways though, behind Oakland). We may not have many black people compared to most southern or east coast cities, but It's not like black people are rare in SF or something. SF also has a small but visible pacific islander minority too (mostly Samoan), which is significant as far as US cities go. 35.6% of SF's population is foreign born, and 45.2% speaks a language other than english at home. Is that not a diverse sounding place?
Another side note: Canadians don't see ourselves as a "socialist" country or a "pro-socialist" country. That's a label applied to Canada by the USA. Canada's not a socialist country... it's a capitalist country with a tad more socialist aspects than exists in the USA. American media like to paint things in black and white, but the reality is that we're all just shades of grey.
Hmmm... seems to me you've fallen right into your own broad brush-painting. If you choose to delve a tab bit deeper into American media, as on those endless Sunday morning TV talk shows, or American AM radio talk shows, you'll find a pretty wide range of political perspectives. But, OK, I will say that Americans tend to be more politically involved. And you guys tend to only notice the louder mouths.
IMHO, Vancouver is a special case of liberal thinking. It's the "center of the universe" for Canadian liberal thinking because of vast governmental involvement and it's loser-friendly climate, one that has grown exponentially over the last 3 decades with true governmental assistance (i.e.: excessive largess with the taxpayer's $$$).
How do I know? What special perspective might I have? Well, I was born in Vancouver. much later, I ran a series of small consulting companies in Western Canada in the late '70s and early '80s before I saw the politically wrought demise of a lot of small biz operations because of mandated "Canadian content" legislation of Canuck "percentage ownership" in oil exploration companies. Of course, some years later, they recanted and saw the need for a less politically restricted business paradigm. I also worked for two Crown Corporations. I also worked in a sawmill (Fraser Mills), under the auspices of the IWA and it's strike regimes every two years, without fail, and always during the summer vacation period. Good fishing in B.C. after all! I also paid Canadian taxes and tried to legally own guns in Canada.
Canadians do tend to just nod in generalized agreement to whatever their elected government officials say. Perhaps, esp. out West, my home stomping grounds, perhaps this is due to a generalized "head state" induced by what you yourself noted right here as a happy consumption of MJ. Biggest cash crop in B.C., and if you have ever hung around the back woods of the B.C. Interior, say in the outskirts of Logan Lake or Merritt, you know what I say is true. It ain't all Ginseng is all I"m sayin'....
I am very political now that I've moved to the US. I appreciate what this country, with all it's faults, can and does offer. You don't get it for free down here (tho' Obama want's to change that...). you have to show initiative. That's not so popular in Canada, by my measure of many years and involvement in free enterprise.
Political activism is not unusual for any immigrant versus the incumbents, because they just take it all for granted. But the level of personal political involvement in the US is, rather than being a negative, a distinct positive. We want to know what our government is up to. Yes, we have literally millions of poor, of free-loaders (thanks, LBJ, for your "Great Society"), we have a lot of overly-well-media-ized radicals, hot-headed flag-waving, gun-toting uneducated "Republicans", but then again, there's also perhaps more people with Bachelor's and Master's Degrees, in total, than the entire adult population of Canada.
Give us our political rancor and happy tendency to yell and shout, while perhaps your average Canadian person is completely content with their government safety-net medical coverage (it certainly really ain't free is it? Ever compare income tax rates?), your lengthy and uncontested unemployment insurance system (ask me about it 35 years ago), your serious labor union problems (the Canadian Union of Public Employees? CUPW?. Never saw a single strike down here since I moved 30 years ago). It amounts to as different level of concern about where things are going.
I note with increasing disgust the swarms of street "people" who mob the free lunch wagon at Main and Hastings every noon. I note with similar disgust those same types who take up residence in the Emerg. Waiting Room at St. Paul's when that same austere org. also failed to notice the MRSA infection my 94+ father was admitted with. and went downhill with for 3 weeks. I wondered out loud about the mob of sleeping, muttering and very unclean types covering the chairs and couches. The equally disgusted security guy said that the hosp. admin. allowed them in out of the cold environs of Davies Street, the Healthiest Street in the World, I'm betting....
So, yeah, despite the difficulty in comparing apples to gorillas, there are some very distinct socialized differences, but everything balances. When you shift your priorities to such accomodation of those who'd really rather not work, you end up with the labor and social problems now obvious in Canada, Britain, France and other highly socialized but loudly touted" progressive" countries. In the US, as I personally proved, if you want to, you can succeed beyond your wildest Canadian dreams. and you get to keep what your sweat and endurance produced.
(There's a reason so very many of the world's population tries so diligently to tunnel, fly, crawl, truck, bus, sneak, trot or float into the horrible USofA. Even Canucks! I remember the chancellors of my two B.C. Alma Maters, UBC and SFU, in a televised conference about 25 years ago, decrying the "brain drain" into the US because of a lack of opportunities in Canada. Eh?
Hey: a bit more spine, and you guys would still have the latest iteration of the Avro Arrow! Oh yeah, and we 'Murkans wouldn't have garnered almost all of the outcast aerospace engineers who brought that marvel of unmanaged free thinking into being. Then, along came Dief the Chief. I know; a unique case, but to my mind, it's symptomatic of unchecked socilism; god bless Messers Deifenbaker, Trudeau and (cough....) Cretien.
You are therefore almost completely right, Robynator; it's near-impossible to compare our countries at any level, and yet you do, with a slightly perceptible "bent" towards your country. Canadians have much to be proud of (the Canadarm, maple syrup, a fabulous B.C. cash crop, outrageous gun legislation masquerading as... no, I'll leave that one alone for now; a healthcare system that provides administratively uniform but technically bad coverage (my dad nearly died before someone noticed his overall condition, and it took my mom 16+ weeks to get an MRI. In Vancouver, for hevn's sake!)...).
Let's just say: we're glad it's you up there, and not Russia. you should be glad we're here, because if we hadn't been, you would be speaking Russian (or Chinese*) up there. You're welcome!
*disregarding, for now, the obvious Chinese invasion you already have in YVR....
Well it's obvious to me that you haven't travelled around the USA very much. If you think that the third world conditions that I see in the USA all the time somehow compare with the lower east side of Van. Then what can I say. I have seen plenty of large areas all over the USA that are as bad as anything I've seen in Panama or The Dominican Republic. If this is what it takes to maintain the system in the USA then you can have it. The USA is changing big time. In 25 years it should be very much like Canada.
In the context of what Americans think of as "liberal", I would think that cities like Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Quebec City and for the most part, Winnipeg, would be considered such. Like others have said though, you have to take things like history and demographics(race, ethnicity, religion, etc.) into account.
Although I now live in almost snow-free Vancouver, the bulk of my life has been in Montreal with 4 years of university in Toronto. I am an English/French speaking gay Chinese Canadian and I have to say, I feel home the most in Montreal. All my friends are fallen Catholics, Protestants, Jewish, Muslim and I have no friends who would go to a church, Temple, mosque or synagogue other than to attend a concert . Although drugs are illegal, pot can be seen consumed almost any club although discreetly except Vancouver where some are so brazen to smoke on a busy intersection. The attitude in Canada for those who worship, is go straight ahead, but don't push it on me. Toronto is the most ethnically-diverse. I could bring you to either an Uzbekhistani or Ethiopian restaurant. In Vancouver in the summer I can bring you to an outdoor weekend market where you swear you're in Hong Kong. Montreal is the cheapest for rents, transit and has a plethora of bring your own wine restaurants. The transit systems in Montreal & Toronto are great and lousy in Vancouver although Vancouver has a train from downtown to the airport. Montreal Sunday summers at the base of Mont Royal off avenue du Parc are hundreds of strangers openly smoking pot to everyone who brings an African style drum.All 3 cities are different. One kind of wonder if these 3 cities are in the same country. Vancouver is decidedly Asian. Toronto's main groups are Chinese, South Asian, Italian, Greek, Carribean, Portuguese. Montreal's main groups are Lebanese,Greek, Italian, both Askkenzi & Sephardic Jewish, Haitian, Latin-American, Vietnamese
Just FYI-Canada is a nation with gay marriage from coast to coast to coast and where abortions are paid by provincial governments(but anti abortion activists are rearing their heads). The death penalty was abolished nationally decades ago.
SF is more liberal than any Canadian city, IMO. I haven't been to Vancouver... maybe Vancouver.
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Oh yeah; not bad beer either....
