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Rob Ford's Toronto

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euler said:
Fords' YouTube show comes out today too. It will be a slog to watch it and mine it for content, but I guess I'm addicted to watching the trainwreck.
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You and pretty much everyone on this board! So you don't need to feel to bad about that!:)

I seriously need to find a new hobby when this is over!
 
Speaking of youtube, I just came across this 22 Minutes Ford Nation/Californication parody song. Decent lyrics and use of Ford footage.
[video=youtube;yrTMCwfIIz0]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrTMCwfIIz0[/video]
Feel free to delete if this has been posted already.
 
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euler said:
Fords' YouTube show comes out today too. It will be a slog to watch it and mine it for content, but I guess I'm addicted to watching the trainwreck.
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I'm still wondering how the Fords will be able to do a show without disparaging people due to race, politics, etc.

It should be interesting.
 
casita said:
Daniel Dale on Twitter:
"Interesting developments: talk of "come to Jesus moment," several church visits, explicit opposition to Pride."
https://twitter.com/ddale8/status/432679542411780096
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I just don't get how these churchgoers can ignore this. Ford called his decision to stop drinking a "come to Jesus moment" and then he goes on to drink (and get high) and just laughs it off. Isn't this blasphemy? Taking Jesus' name in vain? Just shows most religious people are hypocrites. If you are "their kind of people" then you can be forgiven a million times (even when your repentance is blatantly insincere). If you aren't, then you'll be cast as the devil no matter what you do.
 
soimelk said:
It's hard to get your head around for sure. I work in Scarborough, with young people and adults born and bred in Ford Nation. After the Steak Queen rant, I polled a number of youth and adults at work who are of Jamaican or Caribbean descent, and they were fine with what Ford said. I was surprised no one who I asked was offended. Similarly, one Jamaican-Canadian colleague is fully aware of Ford's gang links and drug problems, not to mention his racist attitudes, yet he intends to vote for Ford in 2014.
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To tell you the truth, I don't see anything implicitly racist in doing an accent impersonation. With Ford I know that there are other incidents and factors at work but trying to paint him as a "racist" in the same vein as the guys Kathy dated will never get any traction. He is culturally insensitive and ignorant, but he's hardly in Aryan nation territory. (And an interviewed member of those groups said he didn't really think Kathy was a "true believer" either -- she was just looking for a way to piss off/get attention from her dad, who openly showed contempt for those guys when she brought them around.)

And racism isn't solely the domain of white people. I've met Chinese people who've said very racist things about blacks, blacks who've repeated ethnic slurs about Chinese, etc. It's not a surprise he's not reviled by these suburban communities -- many of them are no angels around their own dinner tables.
 
Slightly tangential, but Wynne will be doing an "AMA" on reddit on Tuesday.

If you are unfamiliar with the format, reddit is a discussion board similar to this one except it is threaded so replies to a specific post are visually represented as such, instead of a linear discussion with quotes like on bulletin boards such as this one. The 'IAMA' subreddit (read: subforum) stands for I Am A. The idea is that you make a post like "IAMA Pixar animator, AMA" (AMA - Ask Me Anything). It's been used a lot by politicians, celebrities, musicians etc to connect with their fans, and have a more honest dialogue with people that isn't possible in a media-style interview format. It works well when the person in question is completely unscripted (George Clooney recently did a fantastic one, there was also an infinitely amusing one by a man who has a rare birth defect that causes him to have two fully functioning - well, you get the idea, and he posted proof!), but crashes and burns and earns the ire of the community when they treat it like a media interview (such as when Woody Harrelson refused to answer any questions that didn't have to do with his new movie Rampart). Notably, President Obama did an AMA and only answered 10 or so questions, and only softballs, but reddit gave him a pass on that one because, well, it's the president of the US posting on the same website we post on yay.

Anyhow. I imagine a lot of questions will be about Ford, and I completely imagine she will dodge all of them. I imagine she will get a lot of very nasty comments, some of them deserved, and she will not open up and her AMA will crash and burn. I hope I'm wrong, but that's how it usually goes for sitting politicians, they don't go off-script.

Now if Rob Ford did an AMA, that'd be grand.
 
Kat_YYZ said:
I just don't get how these churchgoers can ignore this. Ford called his decision to stop drinking a "come to Jesus moment" and then he goes on to drink (and get high) and just laughs it off. Isn't this blasphemy? Taking Jesus' name in vain? Just shows most religious people are hypocrites. If you are "their kind of people" then you can be forgiven a million times (even when your repentance is blatantly insincere). If you aren't, then you'll be cast as the devil no matter what you do.
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I have a great experience with Roman Catholics doing just that, anything they want, that's what confession is for; not all RCs are like this, but they are fundamental in their dogma.
 
JWBF said:
I have a great experience with Roman Catholics doing just that, anything they want, that's what confession is for; not all RCs are like this, but they are fundamental in their dogma.
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Yup, although every religious group has segments that act this way. If you're evangelical Protestant you don't even go to confession, you just confess by yourself to your Bible and come out saying that Jesus forgave you so everyone else has to as well.

Hell, it doesn't even have to be a religious group, just a self-identified tribe; I knew of an NDP-voting artist who got away with horrible things because his NDP-voting artist friends couldn't fathom that an NDP-voting artist could also be a violent criminal who preys on women. It was easier to believe that every single one of his ex-girlfriends was lying.
 
Bluffer said:
I live in Scarborough, and took a cab home from Warden station last week. The driver told me he liked Ford because he smoked a lot of weed, and seemed ok with the crack use too. Things got awkward pretty quickly. If the only questionable thing Ford ever did was get high on the weekends, no big deal. But we all know it's a lot more serious than that.
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With people like that I will just go along with them, nod my head but then complain, "All I wanted from Ford was a casino. Didn't have to be the gigantic MGM plan, just a place in the city where I could go, have a few drinks, play blackjack and poker. Craps. Some pai gow. But he couldn't even make that happen. Should have been a slam-dunk! And he was so bad at trying to convince people, that now the subject of putting a casino in Toronto is toxic and no one will touch it for at least the next five years. So screw him. Thanks for nothing."
 
soimelk said:
Good predictions. Your post reminded me about the role each major paper has played through the many developments of this scandal. In my view, the National Post has really been left in the dust in terms of its contribution to new scandal developments, and in its willingness to take principled editorial stances. Even the Ford Kingmaker Toronto Sun has fared better in adding important details to the story.
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Agree on NatPost. Chris Selley et al. keep talking about the Star's 'obsession', but really, it comes out like NatPost is bored with the scandal, so let's move on. Pretty weak from journalists.
 
TJ O'Pootertoot said:
. (On a smaller scale we've also seen a lot of downtowners blame the suburbs for Ford.) Toronto has to accept some responsability for this and part of that process, IMHO, is making a concerted effort to end and heal the embarrassing city/suburb "divide" that he has exploited and exacerbated. It was perhaps Miller's greatest flaw (well, after the garbage strike) and Ford has ridden it to the bank. The best way to take away his ammo is to have someone who can sincerely speak to everyone.
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Seriously, the revisionism over Miller is crazy. You might not have liked Transit City or the greening of suburban towers schemes, but those Miller policies were the most tangible policies aimed at the inner suburbs since amalgamation. Even the garbage strike meme is being written by people who, emotionally, wanted to lash out at the garbage workers. The contract he signed was fine for the city. It just wasn't enough punishment for folks mad about the strike.

I think a LOT of Ford's support came from folks wanting to toss the garbage workers out on the street. Not for savings, but for revenge. He won't get that vote again.
 
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