Awesome, please produce a reading list here to show how you came to this understanding.

Obviously, criticizing settler-colonialism is not even remotely related to “send settlers back,” and you know that, I know that, because you never see people demanding that. I don’t care if criticizing things makes you catastrophize, you people need to be told this shit because you never actually accept the implications. If you cared about practicality you wouldn’t spend so much time convoluting something like this and instead accept that criticisms of colonialism are a necessary element in whatever gradual measures you pretend to subscribe to.

What a waste of time. Won’t answer to anything but that reading list.

I’m saying that your explanation is too reductive and ahistorical.

Yes, the current conditions have influenced how people in the metropole – within the spaces that are privileged by colonialism like Canada, the US, the EU, the UK – question the legitimacy of this system, but that doesn’t guarantee its end. Things can just keep getting worse and more violent, and we know that because the last time people in the metropole expressed this severe level of dissatisfaction in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, it didn’t end colonialism or capitalism. We live under the same system they did, and it has become exponentially more destructive and violent since their time. Privileged people in the metropole were satiated by marginal improvements in social welfare and economic policies like the New Deal and suburbanization, and readily abandoned any solidarity they purportedly had for each other or other workers internationally. To suggest that this system will change fundamentally just because the affluent white workers are finally unhappy with it is the exact narrative that people who have not fought this system for generations would intuitively subscribe to. Activists in the metropole tend to coop and appropriate anti-capitalist and decolonial movements more than they elevate them.

Zionism relates to this because of how especially energizing and spectacular it has become in popular discourses in the metropole since Israel began this more militaristic campaign of genocide three years ago; over a century after their colonialism started and nearly eighty years after the first Nakba. A tactic that liberals use to obscure or minimize their own genocidal violence is to use particularly visible and obvious images of genocide and political violence to define what that violence is so that their more invisible and gradual means of genocide are less immediately apparent as genocide to most people in the metropole. Canadians will more readily understand that genocide looks like the Holocaust in Nazi Germany and Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, and not the Canadian state’s impoverishment of Inuit in Nunavut or the targeted killings of Guatemalans by Canadian mining corporations (that the state supports financially).

I’m saying that yes, Canadian Zionists are a hate group, but that we should not be satisfied with that recognition so long as the fundamental values and motivations of that hate remain the fundamental organizing principles of this country. My example of Hamas being officially classified as a terrorist organization under Canada’s Criminal Code, which also defines hate in a vague way that is alienated from the politics of white supremacy and settler-colonialism, was meant to demonstrate that liberals will readily concede that Zionists are hateful if it means they can still classify groups that resist colonialism as equally hateful. They care less about defending Israel than they do defending their own genocidal interests.

Jesus fucking Christ, if you want to be a Marxist, you have to fucking read.

Right, could you like, cite anything to explain where you got this understanding? I can tell you can’t, because that second paragraph is imperialism, not nationalism, ultra or otherwise. You’d only make that mistake if you were just vibe-defining this, so I wonder why you felt the need to do this at all.

Nationalism isn’t just “when a place borders,” it is a specific set of relations and politics where ownership over land and access to the resources of that land is privileged through the arbitrary restriction to a naturalized (as in, imagined to be intrinsically and inevitably guaranteed power) group of people and dispossessed from an exploited or colonized group of people. It emerged in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a way to rationalize settler-colonial hierarchies and unify disparate groups of European peoples in the imperial peripheries and metropole around manufactured cultural commonalities like language or heritage. I’m sure you’re aware of German Wars of Unification and their subsequent consequences. New Brunswick and Saskatchewan don’t have obviously similar material conditons besides that they are on the same continent and have similar ways of life forced onto them by a settler-colonial, liberal capitalist state. Settlers in both of those provinces do imagine a common national identity, which is “Canadian,” but that is something intentionally constructed by the state. And no, it isn’t “arguably” bad, unless you’re about to try and argue that the genocide and dispossession of indigenous peoples is only relatively wrong.

Imperialism is the subordination of other groups of people by a privileged group of people within a metropole or core to facilitate the extraction of resources back to that metropole through economic, political, or military coercion. Though it certainly may involve nationalism, as EuroAmerican imperialism does today, it is a distinct set of politics that does not require the same relations as nationalism as it refers to specifically the subordination of external groups of peoples and their lands to the benefit of the privileged, imperialistic group. Canada and the US began as settler-colpnial states on the eastern half of the continent now called North America, and both have expanded westward as part of imperialistic campaigns against indigenous peoples so secure access to the land for their settlers and therefore the transference of resources and power to the benefit of the metropole. Both foster national identities, but those identities are actually subsequent developments of their imperialism and function more to maintain control of those holdings by the metropoles than it was a means to facilitate that expansion.

These things are often cooperative, but they are by no means one thing. Israel is indeed a settler-colonial state occupying Palestine, but it’s one founded on nationalism by the creation of an arbitrary, “unified” Jewish ethnic identity (that also excludes black and African Jewish peoples) and relies on that to exist. Their expansionist and fascistic (which is found in that crisis narrative you reference as the “need” to eradicate potential threating groups) politics are indeed an example of the interrelation between nationalism and imperialism, but are not fundamentally different than Canadian and USAmerican nationalisms and imperialisms just by merit of being “more” violent, and therefore does not constitute some comic-book power up of those politics.

The only reason to distinguish it in the way you and the other commenter has is to misinform and exceptionalize Israel’s settler-colonial genocide of Palestinians and salvage some national identity for equally genocidal states like those in Europe and North America (whom cooperate with Israel for this very reason).

Fucking stop talking about shit you don’t know about, ffs with people on here.

Yes. That is what all settler-colonial states ever are, extractive enterprises. Everyone please remember that when you celebrate So-Called Canada Day.

Again, I’ve never researched this before (especially so for Quebec), so I guess it is a little surprising that public spending like that wouldn’t have to disclose some specifics around the use of funds and who is involved for contracts.

And like, yeah, but what level of government is this? Was it a consequence of municipal decisions? Provincial funding? The general neoliberalism that has dominated Canadian politics and economics for the past four decades? There are a lot of factors to determine how much of a concern this actually is and how to realistically address it.

Okay, but you do understand that anyone can just say that though, right? Do yo have any public links that you’d be aware of from working in the govt that relates to information on this?

Could you explain where you’re getting the term “ultranationalist,” and what distinguishes it from nationalism in this case?

Yeah I think the size of the municipality is a great thing to keep in mind for this, as I’m sure a more rural, low population, and dispersed municipality would likely have less funding to update and maintain these systems. What I’m curious about is if this is a consequence of that neoliberalization – whether this was a result of reduced public funding and therefore the adoption of privatized, profit-driven solutions – or if it was simply a consequence of older infrastructure and poor discipline. Those are very different explanations that present their own risks for the rest of us to be concerned about and options for what we are able to do about it.

Why is that most likely? I’m having a hard time finding reliable information on how these water treatment systems are actually designed, but everyone feels very comfortable speculating.

I mean, SSH would create some barriers that makes this question even more relevant, if there was a weakness somewhere (even if just because remote access was available), it better have been a result of user error and not poor infrastructure design.

I think it’s certainly fair to say that the receding benefits of colonialism and capitalism in the metropole has influenced how privileged groups have begun to question the legitimacy of this system, but it’s also important to remember that this isn’t the first time that’s happened in America or Europe, and liberalism is exceptional at appropriating challenging ideas. The current fascist culture in the US and Canada is the consequence of a decades-long neoliberalization of the economy and integration of social justice rhetoric into neoliberal politics with popular success (Jasbir Puar has produced some incredible scholarship on how this relates to contemporary imperialist and appropriation campaigns in Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times). It also isn’t like Canadians and Americans are terribly concerned about imperialism through “neocolonial” tactics like corporatization and privatization instead of direct state occupation and extractive enterprise.

For example, Canada hosts the majority of the world’s mining corporations, and the state heavily invests in that industry; the current Liberal government was elected on the grounds of being preferable to a more overtly fascistic Con platform and has since expanded public funding support for privatized extractive industries like fossil fuels as climate change kills more and more people in the Global South every year. So, the fact that most people only recognize the colonialism in Palestine as a result of Israel’s very visible and undeniable genocidal violence is actually beneficial to a system that primarily uses those more invisible and abstract mechanisms of genocidal violence. The genocide in Palestine is only a part of Canada’s participation in genocidal violence, and the state’s interest in supporting Israel is more peripheral than its investment in continued extractive and destructive industry in colonized spaces of the Global South.

That’s also why I’m saying that it is important to recognize the fundamental values behind these politics, as the majority of people are denied political literacy by this same state and are therefore vulnerable to rhetoric that occludes those values.

I think you misunderstand what “exceptionalize” means in this use. Exceptionalizing means that something is defined as deviant with either a positive or negative connotation, or in other words, that its traits are constructed as exclusive to it rather than as typical of whatever group that the exceptioanlized thing belongs to.

To exceptionalize Zionism as a hate-group would be to say that it is unusual in its motivations and tactics compared to settler-colonial states and politics generally as well as other hate groups. Zionism in Canada is very much enacting genocide in its moblization of sympathetic groups within Canada and influence on the investment and funding policies of institutions within Canada as well as the Canadian state; which again, directly supports Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. I’m not saying that Zionism should not be classified as a hate group or discussed as a hate group, since its subscribers do have specific political intentions and interests, but that we cannot exceptionalize the racist, genocidal politics of Zionists as anomalous or deviant from Canadian politics or from white supremacy. There is a misconception that Israel is somehow hyperbolic in its violence, even though its methods and effects are comparable to that of the US and Canada, and any white supremacist groups within them. Canada is a white supremacist state, despite incidental and periodic protections for racialized peoples, but considers overtly white supremacist groups as hate groups as it allows the state to define white supremacy by the image of those hate groups, not its underlying philosophy and historical processes.

The reason Canadians are only willing to recognize Zionism as genocidal once its violence became undeniable during the most documented genocidal campaign in human history is exactly because that immorality is now obvious in the same way that white supremacist militias within Canada and the US are obviously immoral. The overtness of that violence allows the liberal state to construct its softer, more gradual tactics as something completely distinct from genocide or racism. A great example of why this is so important is the fact that Hamas is already defined as a terrorist group in the Criminal Code, which was recently amended through Bill C-9 to define hate as, “as an emotion of an intense and extreme nature that is clearly associated with vilification and detestation.” Therefore, any equivalency between these “hate groups” would mean that the politics of Zionists and Palestinian resistance are equivalent, “both sides are bad because they are exceptionally violent and express hatred for another group,” which hardly describes the power differential between those groups as well as the sympathy that the Canadian state has for only one of those groups and why.

Hope that explains it better.

~ source for quote: https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/pl/c9/index.html

Yes, which is why it’s so important that we don’t exceptionalize Zionists as a hate-group in Canada; it is something facilitated through the same system Canada participates in and enforces. The only reason liberals here are comfortable doing that now is they recognize that the popular opinion has shifted and they want to salvage the underlying morality and settler-colonial philosophy by constructing Zionism as anomalously violent and racist.

Canadians have supported Israeli genocide of Palestinians pretty much since the beginning (there are many cases of Jewish communities in Canada raising money to send to Israel as early as the 1920s). There is certainly nuance in how and why groups in Canada come to support it, but the Canadian state does first and foremost because Israel is another settler-colonial state and Canada must protect Israel’s right to commit genocide to ensure its own right to continue its genocide of First Nations and indigenous peoples of Turtle Island. This was of course only exacerbated by the wave of Islamophobia precipitated through the US imperialist campaigns in the Middle-East and Central Asia (which the Canadian state also supported, of course). Portrayals of Israel as a legitimate and moral polity in Canadian education curricula have predictably received very little opposition until quite recently, when the genocide took on a particularly visible phase following 2023.

Nationalism (no, not “ultranationalism”) is fundamentally hateful in its arbitrary assignment of an idealized group of people with a natural right to land. Zionism has been oriented around Palestinian dispossession and erasure since its emergence in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, there is no “inward-focused” element here that somehow doesn’t make it an international ideological movement in Canada. There aren’t any especially naughty Zionists that make the movement look bad, it is fundamentally a genocidal endeavour the same way every settler-colonial state is.

I really hope you have at least one reading on any of these topics to recommend since you’re making some pretty incredible claims here that defy most historical and decolonial scholarship on them.

This is true? The article doesn’t even mention what municipality this was, so it’d be good to actually see where this happened as well. I’m trying to find sources on this, do you have one?

There’s far more secure methods than what you listed, but I’m also curious how this happened as neither the article or anything it cites specifices what the actual weakness was. I would love if someone has any sources on this infrastructure. If they are accessible via the internet, why was any device with an SSH key compromised and how? It would likely be on that end and potentially any cybersecurity contractor that was used for this (I’m guessing this is a consequence of some neoliberalism as per usual).

Could you explain how this relates to the article about Russian-contracted actors? The source you linked doesn’t make that association beyond that both Russia and the PRC are cybersecurity concerns, and neither this article or the CSE report it references mentions any hardware used in this system and that report only stated they are concerned about PRC cyber-attacks, but not that this specific attack was in any way related to the PRC or that devices used in these systems are potentially compromised by the PRC is used in this system (the CSE report even emphasizes personal mobile devices, not the infrastructure of public services). The source you link also just talks about routers like, in general, which is a given in network security, and I’m sure that there is indeed a risk given the production of these devices (such as whether there is proof that this was on a network that used Westermo devices), but there’s no specifics that indicate something along the lines of PRC having direct remote control of devices used in this infrastructure. Given you’re also posting a known propaganda network (Postmedia Network agencies are basically tabloids), I’m curious if there’s some real sources associated with any of this.

(this is also the first time in my life that I’ve seen someone say that “tankies” are keeping up an illusion about Chinese tech as more secure, I’m curious where that’s come from as well)

Does anyone have any sources or knowledge on how the network infrastructure for these systems are designed? I’ve never investigated this and wouldn’t know where to look, and this article doesn’t provide much information (it’s a Postmedia Network source, btw, so take this all with a grain of salt).

I can’t imagine that any remote access isn’t done through SSH or an intranet for exactly this reason. Is that incorrect? Or is there a reason they wouldn’t be and a way that these systems could be compromised by an employee’s device that has access to the internet?