I love the notion that the café had such depth of feeling that it "shuddered." When capitalist-pig owned places go out of business, they merely shutter.
That's the only reason I'm blogging that too-predictable news. Well, that and the fascinating phrase "the colonial death camp we call 'Canada.'" Canada normally flies under the radar, following the strategy of inconspicuousness that works all too well in this crazy world.
10 days ago on this blog, we looked at the question "Why wouldn't most people decide the best way to live is to be as inconspicuous as possible?"
Do pay attention to inconspicuous things. And when you see them, don't be afraid to offset their inconspicuousness by using hyperbole. Phrases like "the colonial death camp we call 'Canada'" can help people think more deeply about things.
Or would you rather bray at obvious things like the way pay-whatever-you-want cafés go out of business?
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58 comments:
"Canada normally flies under the radar"
Is Canada such a boring country that it triggers even Althouse into using such a cliche?
"following the strategy of inconspicuousness"
Inconspicuous to Americans. I detect a whiff of superpower condescension.
"Phrases like "the colonial death camp we call 'Canada'""
I agree that it is an interesting phrase, as further illustration of the true feelings of progs and their violent ideation.
as an communist and an anarchist, and a cop hater..
the owner Surely wouldn't have minded if people had come come into his store,
raped and killed EVERYONE, and taken EVERY THING in the store, Right?
maybe he should move to cali, and reopen his store There?
I would rather bray. If only because capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other economic system. Socialism/Communism has done just the opposite. (See: the Bidette administration)
"the colonial death camp we call 'Canada.'"
Someone's channeling Castro. Bravo. They should go to Ottawa and tell his son, he'll be thrilled.
Running any sort of business is ...CAPITALISM.
Capitolism is a system of commerce -
It is not a a system of coerced government. (like Socialism or communism)
This guy is a moron. But then - all leftists are morons.
Canada does have some obvious and serious cultural issues. It's the land that spawned "arch-conservative" Jordan Peterson with its compelled-speech gender-pronoun law way back in 2016. It's the land of Justin-probably-the-son-of-Fidel-Castro-Trudeau and his goofy school-boy-dictator blackface/brownface antics. It's the land that brutally crushed the anti-COVID-mandate truckers too.
Many old timey leftists have become neo-conservatives or alt-right but lack self-awareness of their transformation. Colonial death camp? Perhaps, but only for libertarians and free-thinkers. Canada is not different from Russia, Scandinavia, and other places with harsh winters that lead to communal conformity.
The Good Earth was about being inconspicuous, as was The Grapes of Wrath. Hard times bring the concept into sharp focus, I think, because the safety margin on life versus suffering & death decreases.
No mention is made of any actual problems the cafe owner has experienced directly at the hands of the rich, the police, the state, the royals, and the rest of Canada, so I'm thinking his rage against reality is deflection. He doesn't want to admit failure of his preferred policy, so instead blames it on everything else but that policy.
Here's a hint for him: Vanity businesses that don't follow capitalist reality will always fail, unless there are donors rich enough to support the endeavor as a charity case. See the antique shops of the wives of rich oil men, for example.
Good catch on the "shudder." I would have read right past it, though to be honest I probably would not read the story at all. Anarchist restaurant fails? Duh.
I have gone to a restaurant that was intentionally rude and it was one of the selling points. The food was really good and they were rude but not too rude, so it was an enjoyable experience. I shudder to think how I would react to this owner, screaming at me about whatever while I tried to eat.
That reminds me of WC Fields and Charlie McCarthy:
Fields: Why, I'll turn you into a venetian blind
Charlie: Ooh, that makes me shutter
You know what creates generational wealth and capitalist seed? Free markets and the rule of law.
I think it's hilarious when anarchists try and organize anything let alone a business. An organization of anarchists is an oxymoron.
I wonder what the food was like.
Does describing Canada as a colonial death camp really make people think deeply? If they do, is the deep thinking about what a loon this woman has become? I have many issues with how Canada is changing. But, if death camp they be, they are damn poor at administering the camp.
I agree the path to insanity can be an interesting topic. But she's a garden variety indoctrinated fool.
So how about I bray about how a simpleton can find HER failure the fault of the Queen, the cops, the government and (apparently) her parents for failing to leave her generational wealth - garnered, no doubt through non-capitalist things?
Total lack of introspection is also inconspicuous in its own way.
Sometimes the human need to question causes humans to act irrationally. Economic lab experiments are hard, at best but this one is pretty good…
Sometimes I wish these kinds of humans would question gravity…
Actually Canada is turing into a multi-cultural hotel for foreigners. The amount of immigration is HUGE, and pretty soon the Hindu Indians, Overseas Chinese, and others will outnumber the native born whites.
Its not the "Great white north" anymore.
Candace Hilligoss! The older I get, the more I think "Carnival of Souls" is the longest and most delightful "Meet Cute" in film history.
Pay what you want only applied to the drip coffee. Everything else on the menu had a price on it.
"Actually Canada is turing into a multi-cultural hotel for foreigners. The amount of immigration is HUGE, and pretty soon the Hindu Indians, Overseas Chinese, and others will outnumber the native born whites."
I just got back from Hongcouver. Canadians in 2100 will view movies of Canada in 1998 like looking at some ancient country. Then they'll ask why things don't work anymore. I wonder if they'll connect some dots.
He’s not lying, eh!
Between the wankers, knobs and yohans, whaddya got?!?!
I pay for waaay too many streaming services. I need to cut back. I mean, how many can I actually watch? It's ridiculous. But the one streamer I will never drop is Shudder.
At risk of sounding brayish I’ll point out that this isn’t the first “pay what you want” cafe story that’s bubbled up over the last few years. Every single one ends the same way. Then another nut in another town gives it a go with predictable results. The reason for highlighting this pattern is to show that the socialist cafes are like socialist countries. Each thinks the other attempts just did it wrong and this time it’ll succeed. Then they flame out like Venezuela. But next year another commie loon will think they can make that dross into gold.
From their website: "The Anarchist has been a huge success in every way I hoped, and has given me so much inspiration and education that I plan to put to use in future projects."
https://theanarchist.ca/
Bud Lite is looking for a marketing strategist.
I was about to write a comment about how, if it failed, it failed because the vibe and/or the coffee sucked. Even at "pay as you can" prices, if it's good, the neighborhood will support it.
But since I live in Toronto and am unfamiliar with The Anarchist, I looked it up. The reviews gave a very different picture--coffee was great but too expensive. Lots of complaints about high prices.
Hasn't every retail store in San Francisco pretty much become pay what you want? Heard a talk show host yesterday describe the political direction the USA is heading for as "anarcho-tyranny." While it may not be a great model for an individual business, it sure seems like a winner politically speaking in Canada or the USA.
Once again, communism fails to defy the laws of economics and gravity. What a surprise !
"Or would you rather bray at obvious things like the way pay-whatever-you-want cafés go out of business?"
Like that and the Death Camp Canada mindset are totally unrelated....
"pretty soon the Hindu Indians, Overseas Chinese, and others will outnumber the native born whites."
Which might mean a return to sanity for Canada in a generation or two. I'll take an aspirational East Indian over a smug, clueless, White Canadian any day of the week.
"Candace Hilligoss! The older I get, the more I think "Carnival of Souls" is the longest and most delightful "Meet Cute" in film history."
I haven't seen it, but using it this morning — just because I needed a graphic representation of shuddering — I got quite involved in reading the story (including the ending) and about how it was made. I still might do a post on the Saltair resort (how the script was written based on seeing the shuttered building and wanting to film a scene with "a whole bunch of ghouls dancing in that ballroom").
"'F*** the rich. F*** the police. F*** the state. F*** the colonial death camp we call 'Canada.'"
Yeah, well F*** you. Oh, we did, didn’t we?
It always amazes me how lefty extremists think that running a successful business must be sooooo easy. George McGovern learned the hard way that it’s easier to run for President of the United States than to successfully run a modest bed & breakfast.
"'F*** the rich. F*** the police. F*** the state. F*** the colonial death camp we call 'Canada.'"
Yeah, well F*** you. Oh, we did, didn’t we?
It always amazes me how lefty extremists think that running a successful business must be sooooo easy. George McGovern learned the hard way that it’s easier to run for President of the United States than to successfully run a modest bed & breakfast.
You have to laugh at "colonial deathcamp" and things like "trans genocide;" it's a special kind of self-refuting hyperbolic statement where the speaker and the hearer both understand the speaker doesn't mean it.
If it's a deathcamp it's the least successful deathcamp in history; if transpeople are being genocided it's the least successful genocide in history.
You'd think people who are about actual (historical & current) deathcamps and genocide would object to cheapening the terms in that way, but usually the shared ideological goals of those people and the people misusing the terms overcomes that. Still funny!
What happens when someone marries a man with a hyphenated last name?
It appears that too many are using speech-to-text and don’t realize it does not know homophones.
Spell check is blind, also.
Does nobody review before posting or publication?
Pay What You Want is a workable idea if accompanied by Get What We Feel Like.
I want to pay nothing. What the cafe owner wanted wasn’t anarchy, because Rusty was right about that above. What the cafe owner wanted was Altruism. Anything else would be a trade of a good or service for payment or, if you prefer socialism or communism, the forced taxation of a good or service.
As for the tough talk and criticism, I find it rude and boorish. I might tolerate it as free speech. I’m might support it with my own words, but I rarely financially support such behavior to avoid rewarding the user of it. When I do, it is for rougher reasons than a cafe provides. For now, talk all the trash you want about Canada as long as Trudeau is the PM.
I'd love to think deep thoughts about living unnoticed, but my mind can't get past the concept of an anarchist claiming ownership rights to any capital, let alone complaining that his petit-bourgeois enterprise failed because he didn't more personal wealth to dissipate.
Hee-haw!
I guess Mr. Simp-Sewer had far too many "according to his needs" customers.
As for "shuddered", just another milepost in the decline of journalism.
tim maguire said...
I looked it up. The reviews gave a very different picture--coffee was great but too expensive. Lots of complaints about high prices.
tim was right, LOTS of complaints about the (very) high prices..
HOWEVER, there Was this FIVE STAR review, which i thought said a LOT about the world we live in
Rachel Brown (six months ago)
*****
i have yet to be able to travel down to this amazing cafe, but from the tiktoks i’ve seen it looks like such a safe and welcoming environment. i heard it got rated poorly for no reason other than people can’t accept the absolute truth portrayed all around this cafe. hoping to come down soon. keep rocking on guys, can’t wait to stop in!! :)
please just think about that, for a bit.
Rachel has NEVER been to the shop.. But DID watch some tiktoks about it.
So, she gave it FIVE out of FIVE STARS..
Then complained because "some people" gave it bad reviews based on their ACTUAL Experiences with it.
But! she's "Hoping" to "drop down" "soon".
To repeat; she gave a FIVE STAR restaurant review.. Based on a tiktok video she'd seen
Capitalism refers to an economic system of retained earnings proportional to productivity assessed in a market characterized by demos-cracy.
That said, beware that the left-right nexus is leftist.
And no Canadian teams in the Cup finals.
It's not actually a pay-whatever-you-want cafe. They charged like normal for everything except basic drip coffee, which was pay-whatever-you-want.
Also, from the owner, responding to a review, "Thanks for checking out the shop. The merch is the primary purpose of the business, with the cafe just being the backdrop." So it's not even a cafe. It's a anarchocommunist-themed tchotchke shop that also sells espresso drinks and gives away drip coffee.
Canadian here. You want deep thoughts on the ideological chants of morons? Here ya go.
Canadian schoolchildren have been taught for an entire generation that the evil "settlers" paved this country from the Atlantic to the Pacific with the graves of millions of "First Nations" who were slaughtered to steal their land. And now they are taught that the only thing that finally put a stop to this butchery is the arrival of Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government 8 years ago. The rote cant of the foul-mouthed anarchist is a deliberate and successful product of our schools.
To keep everyone onside with this slander, every 6 months or so another "mass grave" of native schoolchildren is "discovered", even though no remains are shown. Any attempt to do a proper forensic analysis of these alleged killing fields is deliberately blocked and forbidden. The 'mass graves' that might actually contain human remains are just ordinary cemeteries, abandoned to the wilderness when the remote schools were shut down decades ago. The Liberal government pays millions to the CBC, the state broadcaster, to keep the "mass graves" story alive.
(And who decided to abandon the cemeteries? Why, the Liberal government of Justin's father, Pierre. If you look at every broken promise, every instance of deliberate neglect, every unjust abuse of the treaties, you will find a Liberal cabinet minister behind it, almost every time. Now you see why Justin blames "Canadians" i.e., anybody but Liberals, for the miserable state of the natives.)
The objective of this "settler" Marxist propaganda is to make "whites" (whatever that is) feel guilty for a crime they didn't even know they committed, and for which there can be no forgiveness, so that they will be more malleable to whatever corrupt shakedown is put forward as the suggested remedy. And it's worked very well -- for now.
But it won't matter. In another 20 years, whites will be a minority here and Indigenous peoples will be an even tinier sub-minority, thanks to the highest rates of immigration in Canadian history. The newcomers don't give a rat's ass about the "First Nations" - not their fault, not their problem. Indeed the only encounter most newcomers ever have with the Natives is to chase them out of their stores. This is OK, because "toxic whiteness" or whatever.
So the raking in of the grift has maybe another 10 years to run before the music stops. Already the south Asians immigrants are on the verge of outnumbering the Indigenous. As are the east Asians. They already wield considerable political and economic power. They direct that power to benefit their own communities, and their discrimination is protected in the Canadian constitution, law and jurisprudence in a way that, say, the Poles or Italians are not.
So the long-term outlook for First Nations in Canada is grim: most of the leadership has depended for decades on bribes and corruption from a mostly white Federal Government, but they will stop being the favored political pets of the white left, as that group performatively commits demographic suicide. They will then be nobody's pet, because the power centres of the New Canadians don't care and don't have to.
The best they can hope for is to become a permanent "victim" class like the Palestinians; unfortunately, there are already half a million "Palestinian refugees" in Canada, and they are much more effective at lobbying for cash in exchange for votes. For a variety of reasons, most Indigenous don't vote. (They were granted the right to vote in Federal elections in 1960 - by a Conservative prime minister.) They must learn to sell their ballots, as other ethnic blocs are encouraged to do by the Liberals.
Oh, and anarchists can't organize a piss-up in a brewery. It's easy to laugh at their brainless fuckery. But they waste a lot of other people's time with their bullshit, and that's a sin.
"And no Canadian teams in the Cup finals."
McJesus hardest hit. No cup for you.
"Under the microscope
You can travel anywhere and hang yourself there
You always got more than enough rope"
"So it's not even a cafe."
Leftists don't do definitions, at least consistent ones. Words mean whatever they need them to mean at the time they use them. See: "mostly peaceful protests".
Notice that it's always someone else's fault their utopia didn't work.
"Pay what you want"
Odd that it took all the effort of designing, building, operating a store to learn that most people would prefer to pay nothing in exchange for sometime of value.
His aspiration for this failed venture was to create a worker's co-op: Once there are multiple workers, my goal is for all of us to make the same wage (a living wage or above), and all to have completely equal decision making power, within a consensus-based democratic system
There are so many ways to fail, but this would top the list.
He says: I am a white, cisgender, queer man. When I used to daydream about opening my own cafe, the idea always left a bad taste in my mouth because I also feel that the world doesn't need more things owned by people at my particular intersection of privileges. However, this opportunity was offered to me, and I see it as an opportunity to use my privileged position to undermine the systems that put me there. The best thing I think I can do is hire people who aren't white, cisgender, heterosexual men, make them equal owners, and follow their lead in making the place less white-male-centered than the industry standard.
He might as well sell vials of monkey pox if failure is his real objective. He staunchly supports "the organised left across Kkkanada". hahaha....Kkkanada. This queer is one f**ked up cisgendered white dude.
- Krumhorn
I think it's hilarious when anarchists try and organize anything let alone a business. An organization of anarchists is an oxymoron.
When I lived in San Francisco in the 90s I saw a blurb in the paper about an upcoming anarchist convention. I said almost exactly the same thing you did, and I considered going, thinking it was going to be one of those goofy San Francisco things like Bay to Breakers or Halloween in the Castro. As turns out they organized themselves onto a BART train to Berkeley where they proceeded to riot and trash a bunch of businesses.
"When I used to daydream about opening my own cafe, the idea always left a bad taste in my mouth because I also feel that the world doesn't need more things owned by people at my particular intersection of privileges. However, this opportunity was offered to me, and I see it as an opportunity to use my privileged position to undermine the systems that put me there."
In other words, "I don't believe the BS I'm spouting."
The world doesn't need more things owned by people like him, but he's just So Special he'll make an exemption for himself? How convenient.
"Or would you rather bray at obvious things like the way pay-whatever-you-want cafés go out of business?"
Anarchist cafes go out of business because their clientele has an entitlement mentality. They expect rich people to come in and pay more so they can eat. No 'generational wealth' among anarchists...and there's a reason for that.
JAORE said...
"Does describing Canada as a colonial death camp really make people think deeply?"
I hear "Colonial Death Camp" and I think "cool band name, bro".
JAORE said...
"Does describing Canada as a colonial death camp really make people think deeply?"
I hear "Colonial Death Camp" and I think "cool band name, bro".
The Cracker Emcee Refulgent said...
"I'll take an aspirational East Indian over a smug, clueless, White Canadian any day of the week."
Unfortunately, those aspirationals include groups like the Khalistan Commando Force.
I would that no one would ever characterize me as "braying" about ANY subject.
“Hard times create strong men,
strong men create good times,
good times create weak men,
and weak men create hard times.”
Canada and the USA are with weak men now... and hard times are coming.
Any place with Terrance and Phillip can't be all bad.
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