Conservatives.

They mistook them for crayons.

Because they pair very nicely with a plate of crayons.

Status quo is their god.

They want the power fantasy of everyone having to listen to them while never having to listen to anybody else

Conservative politicians want to be elected. And the way they want to do this is by stoking meaningless (and mean) culture war issues to keep their base a)angry and b) not focused on economic inequality caused by their donors.

Not centuries. It's more like they want to live inside a sitcom from the mid-20th century, where everyone is white and middle-class and living in a "traditional" male-led nuclear family that occupies a house in the suburbs, and pollution and its ilk aren't even worthy of mention.

To the Conservative mindset everything is a zero sum game.

Give rights to minorities, that’s taking rights away from white men.

Give restaurant patrons the right to dine in a smoke free environment, that’s taking away the rights of smokers

Increase the minimum wage, that’s devaluing the wages of everyone else

Probably the most telling in a US context is Medicare for all. Free health care devalues their paid healthcare. I mean healthcare is healthcare (sure some doctors are better than others) the only reason someone would be upset that other people could be entitled to the same healthcare as them, whilst costing themselves less, is because these people think they are more deserving of healthcare than other people.

Well that’s the danger - the conservatives here went full mask-off racist poor-haters which wasn’t as much of a surprise as their unbelievable lack of belief in anything.

No ideology, values, or any other mechanism holds them - not even science, which they pretend to believe in, when it suits them. The so-called ‘adults’ in the party have succumbed utterly to the cult. There are no rational leaders, only figureheads and capos.

It’s shameful and beyond pathetic, and I’d like to think Canada would never fall to such insanity, but the mechanism by which it was carried out (facebook, twitter, Qanon, convoys, right-wing news) are all the same. More power to you progressive Canadians. Hopefully you can weather it.

Paper straws do suck though.

I'm in Toronto, and I believe the city has banned plastic straws. I think plastic straw bans tend to be harmfully distracting from the larger issues. (To be clear, I think we have a massive plastic pollution problem.)

I was in a Hawaiian cocktail bar in Toronto recently, where the drinks are made to be drunk with straws and half of the people at the table asked for a second straw halfway through their drinks as the paper straws had stopped working well

We should be selling and marketing bring-your-own reusable plastic straws, with a small washable traveling case and a cleaning brush, maybe 4-packs

I think that is a really American thing though. I have never been to a place that had plastic cutlery and single use flatware.

Interesting! Care to provide your province and urban/rural? I live in downtown Toronto and unless there's waiter-to-table service, there's nothing reusable except glassware in bars and potentially plastic cups for free water. Other Torontonians, please chime in if you've seen anything different. Most places don't ask "to stay or to go?" any more, or if they do the only difference is a bag

I only take offence when others are forced to be exposed to it.

People such as the staff who have to work in the smoke filled environment?

Man thinking about the Roman empire clock now reset to 0 (again).

Yup. See also the rampant use of ancient busts as profile pics. For some reason they are obsessed with the penis-graffiti-drawing, buttsex-enjoying, poetry-writing ancient Romans (and Greeks), when I'm pretty sure a typical aristocrat of the time would find them boorish and incredibly uneducated simpletons, barely fit to till a field.