Janet Bufton 🍁🌻
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janetbufton.ca
Janet Bufton 🍁🌻
@janetbufton.ca
3.3K followers 450 following 3.3K posts
Canadian mum, 3D liberal in Babylon
Writing collected at janetbufton.ca
diversity dynamism democracy Detroit Lions
Elbows up.
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janetbufton.ca
Got one for the bird butts feed.
Tutu the black masked blue lovebird looks down from perching on a lamp shade. On the bright (top of the image) side is his fluffy, light blue butt. He is very cheeky, and not only because of the butt.
January 10, 2026 at 11:10 PM
janetbufton.ca
This is the second paragraph of MTG's Wikipedia entry. All of this, and maybe most importantly her support for an attempted coup, needs to be recanted for evidence of liberalism. Not just her political tactics.

Liberalism is not just using democratic tactics.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjori...
Greene has promoted Islamophobic, antisemitic, and white supremacist views including the white genocide conspiracy theory,[8][9] as well as QAnon, and Pizzagate.[10][11] She has amplified conspiracy theories[12][13] that allege government involvement in mass shootings in the United States, implicate the Clinton family in murder, and suggest the attacks of 9/11 were a hoax.[14][15][16] Before running for Congress, Greene supported calls to execute prominent Democratic Party politicians, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.[17] As a congresswoman, she equated the Democratic Party with Nazis, and compared COVID-19 safety measures to the persecution of Jews during the Holocaust,[18][19][20] later apologizing for this comparison.[21] During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Greene promoted Russian propaganda and praised its president Vladimir Putin.[22] Greene identifies as a Christian nationalist.[23]
December 30, 2025 at 2:39 PM
janetbufton.ca
In our FAQ on the far right, @tomgpalmer.bsky.social and I write about the inherent instability of far-right coalitions. When they turn on each other it's an opportunity for liberals opposing them.

That opportunity is not that they're liberal after all.

www.theunpopulist.net/p/your-compr...
Despite their alliance against the live-and-let-live philosophy of liberalism, the groups making up the far right are often aware that they are also potential enemies. To take an obvious example, ultra-nationalist identities clash, since the followers of each assume that their nation is better than the others and should dominate them. If their common enemy of liberal tolerance were to be dispatched, so would their reasons for cooperation. In turn, these groups would be primed to fall on one another in violent conflict over control of territory. Descending into violence is not, from the perspective of many far-right groups, such a bad thing—their worldviews share a common belief in the superiority of the warrior ethic to “bourgeois” life in tolerant and cooperative civil societies. Violent conflict, in their view, makes for manly, robust, strong, and powerful societies by revealing through struggle the power hierarchies that should govern our social existence.
December 30, 2025 at 2:39 PM
janetbufton.ca
Zany to the max.
Yakko is launching Wakko on a rocket. This is a McDonald's Happy Meal toy from 1994.
December 24, 2025 at 3:03 AM
janetbufton.ca
The children are helping to decorate the snowman-shaped cookies.
Nondistinct shapes completely encased in rainbow sprinkles on a paper plate.
December 20, 2025 at 11:24 PM
janetbufton.ca
Delving into your ancestry will not reveal that you spring from a natural aristocracy. It will show that we have all been brothers, like it or not. We’re all more closely related than we know, and our family has been murdering its own. I’d think a realization like that should send every nationalist running for the shelter of cosmopolitan liberalism. Here we will treat you as a man and a brother, no matter who you are, and nowhere else can promise that. Let’s build a polity that’s faithful to the memory of all of our ancestors.
December 12, 2025 at 10:24 PM
janetbufton.ca
Cathartic, if nothing else.

open.substack.com/pub/youngvul...
I feel fucking mental because I’ve written about it multiple times on here and multiple times elsewhere but it’s not done anything, and yet I feel like I have to keep saying it because I’m watching those people fall further and further down the rabbit hole and I have no idea what else to do. I’m watching the fascists win not by being especially cunning or clever but by instead standing around and holding a big sign that says “jump in this hole if you’re an easy mark!” and somehow guiding around two thirds of our political elite directly into the big hole.
December 6, 2025 at 2:08 AM
janetbufton.ca
😰
A graphic of muscle strains. Grade 1 shows a red area on the muscle. Grade 2 shows a partial tear, with visible separation on either side of the tear. For the grade 3 tear, the muscle is completely torn, with the two halves separated.
November 29, 2025 at 4:59 PM
janetbufton.ca
We are habituated to the technocratic details of a budget mattering most—which taxes are raised/cut? Where is spending directed? What is regulated and how? When will the budget balance?

It's all now secondary to digging in hard to defend the open society.

open.substack.com/pub/iandunt/...
We are in a struggle against populism. That is the story of our age. It desires a closed society: closed to people, and goods, and ideas. It would impoverish us, then use the hatred and anger which results to target immigrants in ever more grievous ways. The open society has the ability to improve people’s lives in a way populism never will. But to do so, it must commit to its principles: rationality, transparency, sober policy-making and national responsibility. We need a tax policy which is geared to growth, an economic strategy which desires growth, and a political agenda which is prepared to face down the nativist complaints which get in the way of growth. That is how we will improve people’s lives. That is how we can kill populism. The Budget may have had some welcome policies, but on the core issue of our time it was an act of criminal negligence.
November 29, 2025 at 11:50 AM
janetbufton.ca
Let's go Blue Jays
A giant puppet of Domer, the OG mascot of the Sky Dome. He's dark green with a blue and yellow shell and he's a bit of a goober tbh. Wherever you go, his eyes follow you.
October 25, 2025 at 12:39 AM
janetbufton.ca
Tutu thanks you for your service.
A blue masked lovebird looks approvingly on efforts to free trade from his perch on a basket under a mirror.
October 23, 2025 at 9:28 PM
janetbufton.ca
Once @aragusea.bsky.social demystifies cassoulet you can do things like use turkey fat to make 15min meatless (not vegetarian) canned beans for a 3yo who only wants white beans (which matters for some reason) and the "bean sauce" that sticks to them when we fish them out of cassoulet. #foodsky
White beans in a skillet with what might approach cassoulet with meat and more time but is perfectly sufficient for Their Majesty Thing 2.
October 13, 2025 at 10:00 PM
janetbufton.ca
For want of partridgeberries, I'm making cranberry pickles.

Cranberries are more one-note than partridgeberries, though, and I wonder if anyone on #cookingsky #foodsky has experience substituing them and would recommend adding something like a little quince.
A bluish pot with a mixture of onions and cranberries and a wooden spoon sticking out. Some sugar and warm spices coat the berries and onions.
October 12, 2025 at 1:02 PM
janetbufton.ca
Mean Girls waiting in a car with Adam Smith for you to hop in and try to figure out how rich or poor people were over long stretches into the past by using grain prices while workers earned near subsistence wages.
October 9, 2025 at 10:21 AM
janetbufton.ca
Here is Tutu and he is not supposed to be on the bananas.
A blue masked lovebird sits on top of a bunch of bananas hanging from a banana stand. He is in front of a tile backsplash that kind of matches his body and the white trim that kind of matches his breast but his head is black and in front of the white trim so he's really not fooling anyone. He's a naughty bird not a master of disguise.
September 11, 2025 at 3:51 AM
janetbufton.ca
also a classic kid move
Two pages from Mo Willems' book Knuffle Bunny On the left page, a man stoops over a toddler in overalls. The caption says, "'Now, please don't get fussy,' said her daddy. "Well, she had no choice..." On fhe right page are two frames. In the left one, a man is holding the hand of a wailing toddler dragging her feet with a huge "WAAAA!" speech bubble. The caption says, "Trixie bawled." In the right frame, the man looks worried as he conforts himself to hold a toddler flopping over backwards above the sidewalk. The caption says, "She went boneless."
September 6, 2025 at 2:51 AM
janetbufton.ca
Here is the direction from the order about explicit sexual content.
Standards for School Library Materials 2. A school authority is required to implement the following Standards for the selection, availability, and access of school library materials: a. The school authority must not select for inclusion in a school library, or make available to any children or students in a school library, materials containing explicit sexual content.
August 30, 2025 at 12:40 PM
janetbufton.ca
Here is explicit sexual content as defined in the order.

(I can't imagine The Handmaid's Tale is excluded because the Commander ejaculates into and not onto Offred.)
d· 'explicit sexual content" means content containing a detailed and clear depiction of a sexual act. This includes, but is not limited to, a detailed and clear depiction of i. masturbation including touching of a person's own genitals or anus with a finger, artificial sexual organ or other substitute for a sexual organ, iii. penetration of the penis into the vagina or anus, iii. contact of a sexual nature between the genitalia, mouth, hand, finger or other body part with the clothed or unclothed genitalia, pubic area, buttocks, anus, or if the person is female, the breast, of another person, iv. ejaculation onto another person, or v. the use of artificial sexual organs or substitutes for sexual organs on the clothed or unclothed genitalia, pubic area, buttocks, anus, or if the person is female, the breast, of another person, but does not include non-sexual content, non-explicit sexual content or any depiction of any nature contained in religious texts or scriptures;
August 30, 2025 at 12:40 PM
janetbufton.ca
...he's a lot more confident than I am that domestic violence is automatically or will remain a non-starter.
And the simplest, one-line refutation of it is to look at the men who were arrested for offences in the various race riots that followed events at Southport last year. Of those men, a staggering 40% had been reported to the police for domestic violence. There is, in other words, probably no single group of people – not in Britain or anywhere else – who are more prone to violence against women than the people now standing outside the hotels denouncing refugees. This, rather than shouting Nazi, is the argument most likely to undermine the anti-refugee protests. We need to be using it in our leaflets, when we talk to people, and on our protests.
August 29, 2025 at 1:25 PM
janetbufton.ca
👀
Population panic – worries about “depopulation” linked to low birth rates – has become pervasive, with dire predictions in both the short and long term. Yet demographers like us – experts who explicitly study population size, composition, and structure – are generally not highly concerned. Why is this? It’s because we understand the strengths and limitations of population projections. Projections can accurately describe how populations will change if we know future birth, death, and migration rates. But demographers are well aware that they don’t have a crystal ball – we can’t fully anticipate economic shifts, political changes, global events, or how future generations will respond to their changing worlds. That’s why the farther we project from the present, the less accurate those projections are likely to be.
August 20, 2025 at 11:56 PM
janetbufton.ca
Some people worship wood.

isaiah-berlin.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/sites/defaul...
"If I find men who worship trees, not because they are symbols of fertility or because they are divine, with a mysterious life and powers of their own, or because this grove is sacred to Athena – but only because they are made of wood; and if when I ask them why they worship wood they say ‘Because it is wood’ and give no other answer; then I do not know what they mean. If they are human, they are not beings with whom I can communicate..." From Isaiah Berlin's The Pursuit of the Ideal.
August 18, 2025 at 5:51 PM
janetbufton.ca
yes also
Marcel the Shell With Shoes On asks what we still consider strange in 2025.
August 15, 2025 at 1:06 PM
janetbufton.ca
Ethnonationalists are more evil than you think, even if you think they are very bad indeed, if you think this👇(from the FT) is just them being stupid.

It's not stupid. It's coherent, scary, evil.

How bad do things need to get before editors demand their outlets understand/explain this?
1/
He begins telling me about how America’s biggest problem is “decades of mass immigration”. I point out that the US is, you know, a nation of immigrants, to which he responds: “It was originally founded by people of north-west European ancestry.” I note there were people there before them. “There were native Americans, and they lost out,” he replies. “Sucks for them.” This is an odd comment from the spokesperson of a party claiming one of its key beliefs to be that “indigenous people have an inseparable bond with their homeland and are its natural stewards” to make.
August 9, 2025 at 6:29 PM
janetbufton.ca
What is the origin of this "rule of thumb"?
in the United States and Europe alike, voters repeatedly said they wanted a slowdown in immigration. A rule of thumb is that whenever the foreign-born share of a population surges to somewhere around 15 percent, there is discontent. In the United States, the foreign-born share has tripled since 1970 and is now around 15 percent. The top estimate, 15.8 percent, would constitute the highest level of immigrants in America since at least 1850.
July 20, 2025 at 9:57 AM
janetbufton.ca
For people who don't want to spend their time doing this themselves, the patch signifies affiliation with or support for Russian invasion and occupation. But I'm not sure if there's a specific group that likes to use it.

www.bbc.com/news/world-e...
Screen grab from the CBC story covering the arrest of one of the accused with a black and white patch with Cyrillic writing. (this was still on Facebook when I looked) Caption is: "A photo from Raphaël Lagacé's Facebook profile posted 2021. It included a caption protesting the Liberals' gun control legislation. He is now charged with knowingly facilitating terrorist activity. Raphaël Lagacé/Facebook." Translation of the script on the patch from a page on which the patch is being sold, found by image search. Google thinks it says "polite people". A screengrab from the BBC story: "Polite men" Russian journalists less aligned with the Kremlin often use the phrase "polite men". According to centrist daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta, "'polite, armed men' are in charge of Crimea now". Describing them as Russian troops in the Russian media "is not the done thing, and even dangerous, too," prominent photojournalist Denis Sinyakov comments on independent website Colta.
July 14, 2025 at 10:12 AM