What have you learned, or how have you changed due to CKA?
Unsound @ Fri Aug 03, 2012 10:36 pm
In a recent thread someone said that "Quebec doesn't get, and never will get, Alberta", Raydan responded that he did more than ever.(Or something like that)
This got me thinking. Although it's possible that Ray was being facetious, I would like to think that his interactions with Albertans here has allowed him to see past common media depictions of Albertans as a bunch of oil rich rednecks. And I can say for myself that my time here has helped me to really know things that I only thought I knew before.I always knew that not every Quebecer was a selfish whinging blackmailer living off the fruits of my labour. Now, due to talking to a few here, I really know that, in a meaningfull way. And it turns out, not every easterner is an "eastern bastard". Again. something I knew, but didn't really know.
Just wondering if anyone else feels the same way. How have your attitudes towards others, or yourself been changed by your exposure to other posters and their thoughts and ideas?
Gunnair @ Fri Aug 03, 2012 11:08 pm
I still hate the Dutch. 
Seriously though, it's been interesting to have Americans hang around the site, more so since most are centre right to far Waco right. They have not been the ones that I have encountered in my time though I bet they hang out here because their own country isn't any fun any more. If they decide to head north when their kingdom collapses, I believe they can live in Kitimat...near the ocean...in trailers.
The Albertans I've encountered here are exactly the oil rich snobby petro-princes that have buying up real estate on my Island (though we make sure their houses are built on fill so that when the 9.1 shaker hits, their houses sink first)
Curt seems to be the token Manitoban here and he acts exactly like I would expect a Manitoban to act like - the Jan Bradey of the Canadian Bradey Bunch.
Everybody from Toronto - which is what Rob Ford is renaming Ontario, acts like they're from the centre of the universe, although it's now a have-not universe thanks to the Alberta petro-princes.
Raydan and Proc are the type of dirty Frenchmen I've met.
And there seems to be very few eastcoasters - mostly because I suspect it's hard to finger peck with a double double in one hand and a maple dipped and a cigarette in the other.
In all, everybody here acts exactly like the sterotypes I have attributed to their particular part of the country.
Save for TG and Strutz - they're mainland girls, which are the best kind of girls. You know...the ones we import to my Island for baby making!
![[B-o]](./images/smilies/drinkup.gif "Drink up")
By the way, Brenda. Chop chop with the fuckin' sammich already! 
And you wonder why the Dutch never conquered nuthin'... or at least never conquered nuthin' and held onto it. Hell, even the French held on to some of their stuff...
Public_Domain @ Sat Aug 04, 2012 12:34 am
Life story, sorry:
I first came to CKA at the tender age of 14. I lurked since I was 13. This site has been a significant part of my online life for my entire teenage and young adult years, which is a weird thing to say of any site.
For the longest time this site was an avenue and unwilling emancipator of a period of some rather distasteful ultranationalist and anti-american views on my part. What spurred that is beyond my memory, but I mostly point to the jabs and jingoistic rhetoric about the War of 1812 from middle school Social Studies teachers. The concept of Canada as an underdog in a sort of emotional nationalist conflict with the United States in this day and age not only existed, but was easily exploited. The humour of authors and actors went over my head, and I felt I was connecting to some deeper message, the reason they felt it even mattered enough to joke about it.
In that militaristic and political virgin stage I hunted down anything "Canadian" on the internet... And low and behold, I found CKA. I also found ViveLeCanada as well. I developed, both online and in real life, a persona that would make me known here as a cartoon character and in real life as a lunatic. It got me infamy by sheer force. Acting like that, it's impossible to not be noticed. Anything I got, I welcomed. I did anything I could to create some sort of ideal, a political reasoning behind the unusual nonsense to fall back on. I visioned myself some sort of hero, a cause for good.
Over time, against my will at those moments, it was verbally beaten into me that I was pretty much out of my mind and what I was saying was undoubtedly regrettable. These hesitant verbal smackdowns were apt and hostile, really the only thing appropriate for some of the disgusting misguided hate-filled things I said. That said, they taught me something, every single time.
When I first learnt about the parties (8th grade faux political election, 2006) I just had no clue at all. They did the worst job possible explaining it. For the first time I read a news article. We had to take a stance. I found something on the Afghan War, and took a conservative pro-military patriotic stance on it. I wanted to be a military buff. But as time went on, and conversations with debate-torn adults here on CKA loomed on, I would start picking up, piece by piece, a new ideology. I looked to the Liberals, fell for the ideal of Trudeau (who I still respect), and became far more concerned about personal freedom and social justice. Still in it's infancy, my political ideals swayed between the Liberals and NDP for a few years. I continued arguing with people here on CKA, often drastically changing my political views. Still in a disillusioned youthful state I saw myself as a sort of candidate-in-the-making; I was going to be the prime minister one day, some how, was all that was going on in my mind.
I eventually would fully conform into a common beast in Canadian politics, and I did so with pride and hate: The left-wing nationalist. Left-Wing Nationalism is really the strangest thing when you break it down to its fine bits, but it makes sense in Canada as the 'socialist' side of our mixed economy is touted by left-wing reactionaries as the only respectable response to right-wing American influences. It's like a very very cold war, one between allies, though with the most unusual and quiet social struggles. The parties that I saw best for this ideology was a conspiracy theorist group called "Canadian Action Party", and the NDP. CAP has been discussed a few times here, and I think one of it's 'leaders' made a clown of herself here for several months.
Over the years I was so vitriolic and asinine that I was banned, sometimes 'permanently', for very good reasons. How I acted then has, it seems, earned a permanent disfavour among the moderators and admins towards me, with the ultimate passivist exception of Trevor himself, even today. I was banned either 3 or 4 times, and I became very familiar with the black IP block page the CKA uses. I worked around it using the same proxy sites that let me use Nexopia at school, with each site getting IP Banned again and again. Somehow I would beg and grovel my way back in, and perhaps out of sheer annoyance I was given another chance, even when many had already been given and blown. Those bans and my "freakouts" really helped me become aware of just how completely off-the-map the things I was saying were, and why they were unacceptable in the first place. They also made me respect the mods here for dealing with something they could not have really imaged having to deal with on a simple political forum. The open hostilities between myself, board members here, and the moderators simmered to a complete standstill as time went on, ending entirely with the perma-deletion of the original "Mr_Canada" account. I came back as "Bill_Hicks" (favourite comedian) and, with "good behaviour" I was put on probation once I revealed myself as their old nuisance (though they were already aware and, I believe, didn't want to rock the boat till I did). I passed the probation and had my username changed back to "Mr_Canada". My recent conversion politically seems to have been a sort of bitter shake for them, and while I've resisted causing problems I still feel there is an icy relationship between the officials and I. I can't say I should expect different, what with how I acted being easily remembered and their trust having gradually been destroyed.
As I increasingly went left I increasingly went at odds with the right-wingers of CKA. They increasingly targeted me and my hyperbolic messages for their outright idiocy. All I could really say in defence now was that I didn't no better, and no one outside CKA actually tried to stop me. To everyone around me as a teenager, I was a political genius, and a dangerous mind to some (as in, if I got what I wanted I'd ruin the country without intending it). As I hit 17 things went haywire for me ideologically, and I found myself very disillusioned with how I was. I started to finally regret the past few years, and how I've strung them along. But it wasn't until about two weeks after the 2010 Olympics that I really had a strong change in how I look at the world. I avoided CKA for a few months, and eventually came back to apologize and renounce everything I had said, then I announced that I'd changed, to the rolling eyes of many regulars, and claimed to now be a communist.
This started up something new entirely, once again it was like I was a political virgin. My temporary leave to learn more on my own before debating was smart for me to do, because I caused a whole new sort of debate to became irritatingly commonplace on CKA. Where I once prattled Anti-Americanism and nationalism nonstop I now spoke of communism and class. For many members, I was a reiteration of the irritating Che-shirt wearing hippie they hated in college, or the Red they'd like to have shot in Korea or Vietnam. And while I could have taken my controversial revolting ideals to some website that would agree with me (RevLeft, namely), I found CKA the funnest place to discuss this stuff. This site often has tilted into outright unusual periods of hostility and partisan anger, with all sides being guilty and difficult. I brought a whole new partisan point to the forum, entirely unsupported and considered by several to be as unusual as claiming allegiance to feudalism.
Conversations here have vastly refined how I view myself as a communist, and while I know no one here is willing to do such a thing, people here have helped me learn not only how to better explain and describe my ideals, but to how to also alter them and expand them. Debates here have forced me to delve deeper and explain things I couldn't just a few posts before. I've ended up deadlocked several times, and will admit to abandoning topics that lost my interest and will to discuss. Not that they are no longer easy, because it never really is, but that I've been out-played for the time being. I always tell myself I'll be back, and I like to think I follow through.
My relationship with CKA is odd but this place is my only permanent mark on the internet. Everything else has come and gone, and I'm convinced Facebook will die before CKA does. If I ever leave permanently is a mystery, for some reason I always take leaves and stumble back curious to have a vitriolic flame war on the world as it is today. I learn more, and I hope I don't piss others off too much while doing so.
There really is no good reason for this being so long, and I'm sorry if you read that all since it really doesn't say much. TL;DR, I was a nationalist, got smacked for it for a few years, became a communist, getting smacked for it now, who knows what the future holds.
rickc @ Sat Aug 04, 2012 2:05 am
Mr_Canada Mr_Canada:
Life story, sorry:
I first came to CKA at the tender age of 14. I lurked since I was 13. This site has been a significant part of my online life for my entire teenage and young adult years, which is a weird thing to say of any site.
For the longest time this site was an avenue and unwilling emancipator of a period of some rather distasteful ultranationalist and anti-american views on my part. What spurred that is beyond my memory, but I mostly point to the jabs and jingoistic rhetoric about the War of 1812 from middle school Social Studies teachers. The concept of Canada as an underdog in a sort of emotional nationalist conflict with the United States in this day and age not only existed, but was easily exploited. The humour of authors and actors went over my head, and I felt I was connecting to some deeper message, the reason they felt it even mattered enough to joke about it.
In that militaristic and political virgin stage I hunted down anything "Canadian" on the internet... And low and behold, I found CKA. I also found ViveLeCanada as well. I developed, both online and in real life, a persona that would make me known here as a cartoon character and in real life as a lunatic. It got me infamy by sheer force. Acting like that, it's impossible to not be noticed. Anything I got, I welcomed. I did anything I could to create some sort of ideal, a political reasoning behind the unusual nonsense to fall back on. I visioned myself some sort of hero, a cause for good.
Over time, against my will at those moments, it was verbally beaten into me that I was pretty much out of my mind and what I was saying was undoubtedly regrettable. These hesitant verbal smackdowns were apt and hostile, really the only thing appropriate for some of the disgusting misguided hate-filled things I said. That said, they taught me something, every single time.
When I first learnt about the parties (8th grade faux political election, 2006) I just had no clue at all. They did the worst job possible explaining it. For the first time I read a news article. We had to take a stance. I found something on the Afghan War, and took a conservative pro-military patriotic stance on it. I wanted to be a military buff. But as time went on, and conversations with debate-torn adults here on CKA loomed on, I would start picking up, piece by piece, a new ideology. I looked to the Liberals, fell for the ideal of Trudeau (who I still respect), and became far more concerned about personal freedom and social justice. Still in it's infancy, my political ideals swayed between the Liberals and NDP for a few years. I continued arguing with people here on CKA, often drastically changing my political views. Still in a disillusioned youthful state I saw myself as a sort of candidate-in-the-making; I was going to be the prime minister one day, some how, was all that was going on in my mind.
I eventually would fully conform into a common beast in Canadian politics, and I did so with pride and hate: The left-wing nationalist. Left-Wing Nationalism is really the strangest thing when you break it down to its fine bits, but it makes sense in Canada as the 'socialist' side of our mixed economy is touted by left-wing reactionaries as the only respectable response to right-wing American influences. It's like a very very cold war, one between allies, though with the most unusual and quiet social struggles. The parties that I saw best for this ideology was a conspiracy theorist group called "Canadian Action Party", and the NDP. CAP has been discussed a few times here, and I think one of it's 'leaders' made a clown of herself here for several months.
Over the years I was so vitriolic and asinine that I was banned, sometimes 'permanently', for very good reasons. How I acted then has, it seems, earned a permanent disfavour among the moderators and admins towards me, with the ultimate passivist exception of Trevor himself, even today. I was banned either 3 or 4 times, and I became very familiar with the black IP block page the CKA uses. I worked around it using the same proxy sites that let me use Nexopia at school, with each site getting IP Banned again and again. Somehow I would beg and grovel my way back in, and perhaps out of sheer annoyance I was given another chance, even when many had already been given and blown. Those bans and my "freakouts" really helped me become aware of just how completely off-the-map the things I was saying were, and why they were unacceptable in the first place. They also made me respect the mods here for dealing with something they could not have really imaged having to deal with on a simple political forum. The open hostilities between myself, board members here, and the moderators simmered to a complete standstill as time went on, ending entirely with the perma-deletion of the original "Mr_Canada" account. I came back as "Bill_Hicks" (favourite comedian) and, with "good behaviour" I was put on probation once I revealed myself as their old nuisance (though they were already aware and, I believe, didn't want to rock the boat till I did). I passed the probation and had my username changed back to "Mr_Canada". My recent conversion politically seems to have been a sort of bitter shake for them, and while I've resisted causing problems I still feel there is an icy relationship between the officials and I. I can't say I should expect different, what with how I acted being easily remembered and their trust having gradually been destroyed.
As I increasingly went left I increasingly went at odds with the right-wingers of CKA. They increasingly targeted me and my hyperbolic messages for their outright idiocy. All I could really say in defence now was that I didn't no better, and no one outside CKA actually tried to stop me. To everyone around me as a teenager, I was a political genius, and a dangerous mind to some (as in, if I got what I wanted I'd ruin the country without intending it). As I hit 17 things went haywire for me ideologically, and I found myself very disillusioned with how I was. I started to finally regret the past few years, and how I've strung them along. But it wasn't until about two weeks after the 2010 Olympics that I really had a strong change in how I look at the world. I avoided CKA for a few months, and eventually came back to apologize and renounce everything I had said, then I announced that I'd changed, to the rolling eyes of many regulars, and claimed to now be a communist.
This started up something new entirely, once again it was like I was a political virgin. My temporary leave to learn more on my own before debating was smart for me to do, because I caused a whole new sort of debate to became irritatingly commonplace on CKA. Where I once prattled Anti-Americanism and nationalism nonstop I now spoke of communism and class. For many members, I was a reiteration of the irritating Che-shirt wearing hippie they hated in college, or the Red they'd like to have shot in Korea or Vietnam. And while I could have taken my controversial revolting ideals to some website that would agree with me (RevLeft, namely), I found CKA the funnest place to discuss this stuff. This site often has tilted into outright unusual periods of hostility and partisan anger, with all sides being guilty and difficult. I brought a whole new partisan point to the forum, entirely unsupported and considered by several to be as unusual as claiming allegiance to feudalism.
Conversations here have vastly refined how I view myself as a communist, and while I know no one here is willing to do such a thing, people here have helped me learn not only how to better explain and describe my ideals, but to how to also alter them and expand them. Debates here have forced me to delve deeper and explain things I couldn't just a few posts before. I've ended up deadlocked several times, and will admit to abandoning topics that lost my interest and will to discuss. Not that they are no longer easy, because it never really is, but that I've been out-played for the time being. I always tell myself I'll be back, and I like to think I follow through.
My relationship with CKA is odd but this place is my only permanent mark on the internet. Everything else has come and gone, and I'm convinced Facebook will die before CKA does. If I ever leave permanently is a mystery, for some reason I always take leaves and stumble back curious to have a vitriolic flame war on the world as it is today. I learn more, and I hope I don't piss others off too much while doing so.
There really is no good reason for this being so long, and I'm sorry if you read that all since it really doesn't say much. TL;DR, I was a nationalist, got smacked for it for a few years, became a communist, getting smacked for it now, who knows what the future holds.
I first came to CKA at the tender age of 14. I lurked since I was 13. This site has been a significant part of my online life for my entire teenage and young adult years, which is a weird thing to say of any site.
For the longest time this site was an avenue and unwilling emancipator of a period of some rather distasteful ultranationalist and anti-american views on my part. What spurred that is beyond my memory, but I mostly point to the jabs and jingoistic rhetoric about the War of 1812 from middle school Social Studies teachers. The concept of Canada as an underdog in a sort of emotional nationalist conflict with the United States in this day and age not only existed, but was easily exploited. The humour of authors and actors went over my head, and I felt I was connecting to some deeper message, the reason they felt it even mattered enough to joke about it.
In that militaristic and political virgin stage I hunted down anything "Canadian" on the internet... And low and behold, I found CKA. I also found ViveLeCanada as well. I developed, both online and in real life, a persona that would make me known here as a cartoon character and in real life as a lunatic. It got me infamy by sheer force. Acting like that, it's impossible to not be noticed. Anything I got, I welcomed. I did anything I could to create some sort of ideal, a political reasoning behind the unusual nonsense to fall back on. I visioned myself some sort of hero, a cause for good.
Over time, against my will at those moments, it was verbally beaten into me that I was pretty much out of my mind and what I was saying was undoubtedly regrettable. These hesitant verbal smackdowns were apt and hostile, really the only thing appropriate for some of the disgusting misguided hate-filled things I said. That said, they taught me something, every single time.
When I first learnt about the parties (8th grade faux political election, 2006) I just had no clue at all. They did the worst job possible explaining it. For the first time I read a news article. We had to take a stance. I found something on the Afghan War, and took a conservative pro-military patriotic stance on it. I wanted to be a military buff. But as time went on, and conversations with debate-torn adults here on CKA loomed on, I would start picking up, piece by piece, a new ideology. I looked to the Liberals, fell for the ideal of Trudeau (who I still respect), and became far more concerned about personal freedom and social justice. Still in it's infancy, my political ideals swayed between the Liberals and NDP for a few years. I continued arguing with people here on CKA, often drastically changing my political views. Still in a disillusioned youthful state I saw myself as a sort of candidate-in-the-making; I was going to be the prime minister one day, some how, was all that was going on in my mind.
I eventually would fully conform into a common beast in Canadian politics, and I did so with pride and hate: The left-wing nationalist. Left-Wing Nationalism is really the strangest thing when you break it down to its fine bits, but it makes sense in Canada as the 'socialist' side of our mixed economy is touted by left-wing reactionaries as the only respectable response to right-wing American influences. It's like a very very cold war, one between allies, though with the most unusual and quiet social struggles. The parties that I saw best for this ideology was a conspiracy theorist group called "Canadian Action Party", and the NDP. CAP has been discussed a few times here, and I think one of it's 'leaders' made a clown of herself here for several months.
Over the years I was so vitriolic and asinine that I was banned, sometimes 'permanently', for very good reasons. How I acted then has, it seems, earned a permanent disfavour among the moderators and admins towards me, with the ultimate passivist exception of Trevor himself, even today. I was banned either 3 or 4 times, and I became very familiar with the black IP block page the CKA uses. I worked around it using the same proxy sites that let me use Nexopia at school, with each site getting IP Banned again and again. Somehow I would beg and grovel my way back in, and perhaps out of sheer annoyance I was given another chance, even when many had already been given and blown. Those bans and my "freakouts" really helped me become aware of just how completely off-the-map the things I was saying were, and why they were unacceptable in the first place. They also made me respect the mods here for dealing with something they could not have really imaged having to deal with on a simple political forum. The open hostilities between myself, board members here, and the moderators simmered to a complete standstill as time went on, ending entirely with the perma-deletion of the original "Mr_Canada" account. I came back as "Bill_Hicks" (favourite comedian) and, with "good behaviour" I was put on probation once I revealed myself as their old nuisance (though they were already aware and, I believe, didn't want to rock the boat till I did). I passed the probation and had my username changed back to "Mr_Canada". My recent conversion politically seems to have been a sort of bitter shake for them, and while I've resisted causing problems I still feel there is an icy relationship between the officials and I. I can't say I should expect different, what with how I acted being easily remembered and their trust having gradually been destroyed.
As I increasingly went left I increasingly went at odds with the right-wingers of CKA. They increasingly targeted me and my hyperbolic messages for their outright idiocy. All I could really say in defence now was that I didn't no better, and no one outside CKA actually tried to stop me. To everyone around me as a teenager, I was a political genius, and a dangerous mind to some (as in, if I got what I wanted I'd ruin the country without intending it). As I hit 17 things went haywire for me ideologically, and I found myself very disillusioned with how I was. I started to finally regret the past few years, and how I've strung them along. But it wasn't until about two weeks after the 2010 Olympics that I really had a strong change in how I look at the world. I avoided CKA for a few months, and eventually came back to apologize and renounce everything I had said, then I announced that I'd changed, to the rolling eyes of many regulars, and claimed to now be a communist.
This started up something new entirely, once again it was like I was a political virgin. My temporary leave to learn more on my own before debating was smart for me to do, because I caused a whole new sort of debate to became irritatingly commonplace on CKA. Where I once prattled Anti-Americanism and nationalism nonstop I now spoke of communism and class. For many members, I was a reiteration of the irritating Che-shirt wearing hippie they hated in college, or the Red they'd like to have shot in Korea or Vietnam. And while I could have taken my controversial revolting ideals to some website that would agree with me (RevLeft, namely), I found CKA the funnest place to discuss this stuff. This site often has tilted into outright unusual periods of hostility and partisan anger, with all sides being guilty and difficult. I brought a whole new partisan point to the forum, entirely unsupported and considered by several to be as unusual as claiming allegiance to feudalism.
Conversations here have vastly refined how I view myself as a communist, and while I know no one here is willing to do such a thing, people here have helped me learn not only how to better explain and describe my ideals, but to how to also alter them and expand them. Debates here have forced me to delve deeper and explain things I couldn't just a few posts before. I've ended up deadlocked several times, and will admit to abandoning topics that lost my interest and will to discuss. Not that they are no longer easy, because it never really is, but that I've been out-played for the time being. I always tell myself I'll be back, and I like to think I follow through.
My relationship with CKA is odd but this place is my only permanent mark on the internet. Everything else has come and gone, and I'm convinced Facebook will die before CKA does. If I ever leave permanently is a mystery, for some reason I always take leaves and stumble back curious to have a vitriolic flame war on the world as it is today. I learn more, and I hope I don't piss others off too much while doing so.
There really is no good reason for this being so long, and I'm sorry if you read that all since it really doesn't say much. TL;DR, I was a nationalist, got smacked for it for a few years, became a communist, getting smacked for it now, who knows what the future holds.
All I can say is: welcome to the human race. A persons political beliefs will change many times in their lifetime. Ronald Reagan was once a Democrat. He went on to be the standard bearer of the Republican party. Many left wing hippies of the 60's and 70's [like Steve Jobs] became the greatest capitalist of all time. Ed Schultz of the Ed show started off as a right wing pundit on a talk radio show. Arianna Huffington was an extreme right winger back in the day, before becoming the darling of the left. Thats how it works. A liberal who gets mugged becomes a conservative. A conservative who gets falsly arrested becomes a liberal. You do not need to appologize for your policital beliefs. Almost all of us move through the spectrum as we pass though life.
Most of us that have traveled to left wing countries have sworn off anything to do with the left when we seen first hand how left wing politics play out in real life. It is one thing to live in a western country and proclaim the greatness of the left, it is another thing to live under a regime of the left. Very few people who live under a left wing government sing its praises. It looks good on paper, but never works in the real world. Your poitical beliefs will change. I suggest you go spend some time in some left wing countries, and see for yourself it is your cup of tea. A few weeks in an actual left wing country.....and you might be the next Rush Limbaugh!
Public_Domain @ Sat Aug 04, 2012 2:41 am
The Communist Party wants to send me to Cuba next year, so hopefully that goes through.
(They like me, they really like me, )
I already disagree with these 'left-wing' countries however, and would agree with many on this site about their 'flaws'. I do however see far more in these countries than most here are willing to see, but I am still not fanatical or completely supportive of any country that considers itself a pillar of proletarian ideals...
To the question of the future, I always say this: I know I'll change, I just hope not radically. Some stay. Some. Dunno if I will. And if I do, I at least hope it's just back to democratic socialism or something, rather than a drastic leap across the spectrum.
Dear future me: Don't do it
ShepherdsDog @ Sat Aug 04, 2012 4:20 am
Almost every former Communist Bloc country has gone hard core crony capitalist when the repressive communists have been given the boot. The only ones who want to maintain communism are those who were friends or functionaries of the Party. Cuba will be the same.
andyt @ Sat Aug 04, 2012 8:46 am
Because hard core crony capitalist oligarchies are not very different to communism as practiced by the Soviets. Who's running the show? The same people who were part of the aparat during soviet times.
Cuba has a health care system ranked just below the US by WHO. They have the highest literacy rate in the world. We're ranked at 23. Imagine where Cuba would be without the embargo.
Rick, have you traveled to left wing countries such as the Scandinavian ones? Did they make you swear "off anything to do with the left when we seen first hand how left wing politics play out in real life."
Tricks @ Sat Aug 04, 2012 8:48 am
I feel like I think things through more, but I doubt I actually do.
Brenda @ Sat Aug 04, 2012 8:57 am
I learned that no matter where you are in the world, people are still the same, and oh so different 
raydan @ Sat Aug 04, 2012 7:04 pm
I guess that the important part isn't really getting to know the individuals here, because let's face it, how much can you get to know someone on-line, it's more about getting more information about stuff going on elsewhere in the country, and getting the point of view of people that are living it... oil-sands, pipeline, wheat board, that crazy mayor in Toronto.
It's also harder for me today to consider everybody west of Québec as the fucking ROC, since I've "met" EB, Unsound, Brenda, Gunnair and all the others, even Andyt and OTI ... sorry for the rest of you if you're offended to have been lumped into "others".
Gunnair @ Sat Aug 04, 2012 7:18 pm
raydan raydan:
I guess that the important part isn't really getting to know the individuals here, because let's face it, how much can you get to know someone on-line, it's more about getting more information about stuff going on elsewhere in the country, and getting the point of view of people that are living it... oil-sands, pipeline, wheat board, that crazy mayor in Toronto.
It's also harder for me today to consider everybody west of Québec as the fucking ROC, since I've "met" EB, Unsound, Brenda, Gunnair and all the others, even Andyt and OTI ... sorry for the rest of you if you're offended to have been lumped into "others".
It's also harder for me today to consider everybody west of Québec as the fucking ROC, since I've "met" EB, Unsound, Brenda, Gunnair and all the others, even Andyt and OTI
... sorry for the rest of you if you're offended to have been lumped into "others".Don't sweat it. I consider you as part of Rob Ford's Toronto.
SprCForr @ Sat Aug 04, 2012 7:56 pm
I've learned that you're all going to be lunch, eventually...
ShepherdsDog @ Sat Aug 04, 2012 8:07 pm
SprCForr SprCForr:
I've learned that you're all going to be lunch, eventually...
Pfffft.....I could use a pair of
SprCForr @ Sat Aug 04, 2012 8:13 pm
...Confirm "Ban user?"...what to do...what to do...
desertdude @ Sat Aug 04, 2012 8:27 pm
I came here looking to learn something about Canada not from any touristy websites or blogs but from real Canadians living in Canada , the real mundane day to day life and nitty gritty stuff and did learn way more than I ever anticipated, even more so I hope I have been able to offer something in return, things like not every brown guy living in the middle east, is a camel jockey who smacks his head on the ground times a day facing a black cube in the middle of the desert has hooks for hands, wears an eye patch shouting "Death to America !"
Although a lot in my initial forays on CKA did think that and I feel a few still do.
Biggest thing I have learned is that Canada is a beautiful and charming country with a lot to offer, populated by a wide variety of people from all walks of life ( Even the french ! 
) that it is not just a big slab of ice with igloos. I have caught myself many a times day dreaming as to what it would be like to be in Canada.
Has CKA changed me in anyway ? Well not much I guess, but I can surely say it has changed the way I think about a lot of things or go about analyzing them.
So all in all it continues to be a pleasurable experience, even though I have no connection to Canada, live thousands of miles away in a totally different world, I still log in often as daily and CKA has its own personal tab on my browser ( laptop, phone and tablet ) so I don't have to rummage through my bookmarks and is always just a click away !