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Cake day: October 21st, 2024

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  • Working for the common good is such a foreign concept, Skippy has to put out a survey to see what contrarian haters want him to harp on about instead of Canada Is Broken.

    Probably questions like, What is the most Canadian thing to do about Trump?
    a) Trudeau is a woke dictator who hates your freedom
    b) the oil and gas lobby are cool and nice
    c) humanizing picture with a kitten and my wife








  • Fantastic take and an easy read. ty for posting it.

    Cross’ book contains a meticulous catalog of social media sins which many people who follow and care about current events are probably guilty of—myself very much included. She documents how tech platforms encourage us, through their design affordances, to post and seethe and doomscroll into the void, always reacting and never acting.

    But perhaps the greatest of these sins is convincing ourselves that posting is a form of political activism, when it is at best a coping mechanism—an individualist solution to problems that can only be solved by collective action. This, says Cross, is the primary way tech platforms atomize and alienate us, creating “a solipsism that says you are the main protagonist in a sea of NPCs.”

    […]

    Of course it’s important to stay informed, and journalists can still provide the valuable information we need to take action. But this process has been short-circuited by tech platforms and a media environment built around seeking reaction for its own sake. Many Twitter refugees made a good choice in migrating from Musk’s X to Bluesky, carving out a new online space that is inhospitable to bigoted debate bros and time-wasting trolls. But in their enemies’ absence, many of these Left-leaning posters have just reverted to dunking on each other, preferring the catharsis of sectarian conflict over the hard work of organizing.

    Under this status quo, everything becomes a myopic contest of who can best exploit peoples’ anxieties to command their attention and energy. If we don’t learn how to extract ourselves from this loop, none of the information we gain will manifest as tangible action—and the people in charge prefer it that way.


  • For anyone who blinked and missed it, Marit Stiles and Bonnie Crombie both stated on Monday morning that they were in agreement with each other on cancelling the Starlink deal.

    So Doug slaps on a ball cap, gets his face in the cameras and says he’d tear up the contract IF the tariffs go through. And rogers/bell/murdoch news said or implied in their headlines that he DID tear up the contract. Headline commentators yesterday seemed convinced it’s something he’d already done. Or it was his idea alone.

    Now he gets to be Canada’s defender - without him actually having to talk to or (god forbid) work with any of our other elected reps during this snap election he chose to call during an international crisis.

    (To my fellow Ontarians: Ignore the neverending polls. Ignore the online commentary telling you the alternatives aren’t doing enough in exactly the right way. Ignore the pages of discourse on how our Democracy just isn’t good enough. Doug took electoral reform away from municipalities that voted for it. Please, show up and vote with your neighbours.)


  • This “Democrats are the reason we have nazis now” thing is giving “Daddy drinks because you cry.” The apathy it generates only helps the worst side keep winning.

    Because it’s nuts. People scolding the remaining leftists online and debating which sort of voting system they’d appreciate the democrats advocating for next time, meanwhile their Treasury Department now answers to completely unqualified culty broccoli-headed 20 year olds, there’s birth quotas for roads funding and nazis are snatching kids from classrooms, the Pres talking about putting immigrants in Guantanamo.

    The only way Both Sides nonsense is productive is if the goal is to keep people arguing online. O shi



  • You’re not wrong. It’s so. SO blatant. “Mom’s cheesecake” blatant.

    Maybe OT, but I think the car-vs.-bike obsession is entirely manufactured and every time a politician stands in the way of bike lanes and public transit, they’re virtue signalling to the O&G lobby. Same with being overly weird about plastic bags, utensils and packaging (petroleum byproduct) and how much we need them.

    On bill 28, he and his gleefully instituted it because his funders and peers want to get rid of unions. Remember that “we have very well paid educators who should feel lucky they even have jobs - paidforbythegovernmentofontario” shit on the radio that August? And I saw them jeering at the peanut gallery when they passed it (Ford was, no surprise, at the cottage or some shit). That whole debacle was DoFo’s owners testing to see what workers rights they could get away with removing by fiat.

    Maybe that’s why he wants a “stronger mandate.” The furry wee gods help us all…



  • Seriously crazy shit afoot. Solidarity from north of the border.

    just outright saying what they intend to do

    Part of the problem is they’re SO hard to listen to. Culty circular logic, the smarmy prep school punk attitude, so impressed with their own middling intelligence. The “marketplace of ideas” type language. They’re very easy to tune out (and I usually do).

    Even in this doc, I had to pause and recommit to watching to the end a few times, because every time one of them starts expounding, my monkey brain screeches “DANGER this person has no soul and would murder you for a toonie!” And the video is less than half an hour long. Your conservative-leaning smart acquaintances face so much more conditioning they need to break through on top of that.

    [edit bc nobody needs to read me speechifying after watching that doc]


  • Ontarians: Don’t let any talking point or any physical threat keep you away from the polls this time. His win is not inevitable. Please, show up and TRY to vote Ford out.

    I want to get behind his Captain Canada act as much as the next person, but the media coverage has been absolutely maddening! DoFo is always patriotic when he’s campaigning.

    We know calling a snap election in the middle of this absolute chaos is bullshit. Mr MZO, Notwithstanding Clause, omnibus bills, continually counter-suing any court decision in our favour, who took away education workers’ right to strike just to show they could, made rent control a mystical thing of the past and on and on. This twit wants a Stronger Mandate? To do what, exactly?

    "God bless the President and don’t get me wrong. Full disclosure: I’m a big Republican.” - literally DoFo

    “Donald Trump’s a business man. He’s a very successful business man. I think he’s a marketing genius. They needed change down in the US. Obama has been an absolute disaster in my opinion in the US. I run a business, the healthcare costs are going through the roof for not only the businesses, but the people.” - DoFo

    “I would love to see Canada be the 51st state. The Canadian citizens, […] They’d have much better health coverage. I think the people of Canada would like it.” - Trump, Jan 24



  • A masterful surf on a tsunami of wtf. That researcher/journalist was a beast and I’m amazed she put together so much crazy in one perfect length explanation for someone as completely out of the loop as I am.

    Still stuck on “freedom cities” tbh. It’s so stupid, it’s hard to get your head around. But I haven’t had to deal with listening to excessively funded tech bro wisdom in well over a decade.

    Anyway, I wanted to leave a quick comment to thank you for linking it here. This quick doc is fantastic and I’ve already passed it on, though as she said, it absolutely makes me seem like a crackpot. Meh. Better to know.

    [edit bc I can’t spell]