The BC Conservative party’s official “climate policy” explicitly rejects the idea that climate change is a “crisis.”
In August 2022, Rustad retweeted a tweet from prominent climate science denier Patrick Moore casting doubt on climate science.: “The case for CO2 being the control knob of global temperature gets weaker every day,” said the tweet amplified by Rustad, adding that people should “celebrate C02.”
In some ways I don’t even blame them. When pretty much every other part of society is telling young men that they aren’t wanted, they are going to turn to whoever is willing to welcome them with open arms. Instead of turning them into allies for those who are disadvantaged they have been told, “No yo go the back of the line.” (sometimes literally, looking at you federal NDP). This results in a large portion of society that is being “radicalized” by the far right because it is the space that welcomes them and makes them feel like part of something, even when it will harm them and our society in the long run.
Sure, but women were literally considered lesser than men in virtually all ways for thousands of years and didn’t attempt to usher in another go at Fascism when their rights got taken away in the US. I am a 40-something man, and I have children who are now young men, and they don’t do this. The issue is we, older men, have failed younger men at large–we didn’t tell them ‘hey you’re being lied to, this toxic masculinity stuff is bullshit, here’s how to be a good partner.’ We let them think that they could act like we did in the 90’s and everything would be fine.
We let the media, particularly conservative, tell them all they have to do is be ‘breadwinners’ and they’ll get everything they want. Then they don’t, and we just… shrugged and said too bad. This is the first time in history women don’t have to be with men to survive, it really hasn’t been the case that long. These young men also, and this part I’m not 100% on the why’s, seem to have very, very low critical thinking skills. Not just because they’re young, but even into their mid 20’s the easy promises of fascism take them over.
There is an horrific irony to conservative media telling young men they’re only worth anything if they become a billionaire and find a partner to have children with, and then doing everything in their power to make that a challenge for those same young men. My kids come to me about once a week to try to figure out how to talk to their friends who are, quite literally, waffling between the CPC and NDP. They hate the way things are, but as soon as their 2SLGBTQIA+ friends get targeted, they go back to the NDP. Basically, they eat up conservative propaganda on Facebook (yes, still), Youtube, Twitter, etc, and then out in the real world they are faced with the opposite: women try to help them, their gay friends are totally normal, no immigrants or poor people come out to assault them.
I bring my kids with me to local workers strikes, Left-wing potlucks, etc, and it’s still somewhat baffling that there’s maybe 5-6 men there, and 40 women.
Instead of turning them into allies for those who are disadvantaged they have been told, “No yo go the back of the line.” (sometimes literally, looking at you federal NDP).
I have no idea what this is, can you link to something?
I agree with a lot of what you’ve said, but we also have to address the fact that men are, quite frankly, more easily tricked than their women counterparts, are more violent than their women counterparts, and have extremely low critical thinking skills. The solution to this is not to go ‘yeah but people are lying to us/them.’ Yes, I understand capitalism exists, we can’t do anything about that while over half of men are so easily swayed by what is frankly low-effort, easily-seen-through promises. We have to address this directly, to men. We’re fucking up. We’re letting our mothers, sisters, daughters, aunts, sons, really everyone down.
Over half of us have bought into this idea that to be a man is to be an unthinking robot with a sex-slave ‘partner’ while we toil endlessly for fascism, having enough children to replace us as cogs in the machine when we die. Why are young men behaving this way? Because the rest of us are too, and they’re learning from us.
Yes we are pretty much in agreement, though I take some issue with your first paragraph that insinuates that men want to “usher in another go of fascism” rather than them just being manipulated by the bad actors that actually want to institute fascism within the western world. Nobody come out and blatantly says they want to institute fascism, they make positive sounding promises to those that feel like they have been left behind by society. You acknowledge it yourself with the dichotomy of supporting the NDP and the Conservatives at the same time.
I believe a large part of it is men don’t have access to role models like they used to. Especially with millenials and after, so many people have both parents working full time and they don’t have the guidance of their parents to the same level as in the past. Not to mention the many split up families where they specifically get even less time with male role models. As a society we have lost a lot of community spaces as well that would serve as a check to children that are going the wrong way. The irony of the explanation essentially being that things are fucked because of a change to traditional family values isn’t lost on me, but I don’t have a better way of expressing it.
As to why it affects men so much more than women, a theory of mine is that boys are just less able to do the things that boys tend to like to do in the past like getting outside and getting their energy out through play (that is sometimes rough). They instead bottle up energy and anger because there is nowhere to learn to express themselves in their daily lives. They have been pushed to a more femine way of play when many don’t feel comfortable with it, not to mention society still not generally accepting boys and men who express themselves in a more feminine way.
Here is a video of the NDP convention I was thinking of. On rewatch it isn’t quite as bad as I remember, but still is a really bad look and should have been handled very differently. Especially considering the NDPs traditional union worker base that would certainly find it insulting.
