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Cake day: August 30th, 2023

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  • spector@lemmy.catoCanada@lemmy.caTwo Party System
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    18 hours ago

    You can fantasize about the kitchen sink of left policy all day long. None of this matters if the population is centrist neo-liberal minded. Carney is proof of this. Doug Ford is proof of this. Ford in particular is smart enough to know not to mess with social politics. That angers the broad spectrum center voters.

    Your dream NDP candidate and platform will not suddenly enamor the population. People don’t personally want to do hard things that are required to address critical issues on the economy and environment. The status quo is the path of least resistance even though the long term consequences are significant.

    The problem is not so much platform. Leftist platform is well known. By now it’s a big scary boogeyman thanks to conservative propaganda machine. The task is making such platform palatable. In other words selling it ways that people won’t be fearful that it will put them personally under hardship.

    People are short term myopic operators. The idea of a greater good for better personal outcomes does not compute. This is the fact of the matter. Why should anyone individual place big lofty but nebulous national/global issues ahead of food on the table for their family. My kids need to eat, is what anyone is thinking really.

    I know you love leftist platform. You can give the list of policy all day long. That doesn’t matter. What matters is making population not recoil at the thought of even one item on the list.

    This is why the NDP became indistinguishable from Liberals. They could not figure out how to sell leftist platform. They got gradually nudged and scared from their convictions.

    Every party is like this. They’re timid inspite of some of them being blustering strongmen. They’re all basically signalling to the the population not to worry because they won’t be the one that makes your life harder than it already is. Unfortunately for left parties the world is right minded (though not necessarily at heart). It’s the hardest to sell platform by simple metric of absolute distance. It’s not about policy itself. The challenge is making that distance to left platform less scary.




  • spector@lemmy.catoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldGood job
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    2 months ago

    Yeah it was a close election. We absolutely did not reject Trump with any consensus. There’s not as much to celebrate people think.

    What people don’t know is the Conservatives here have had a revolving door of leaders in search of a Trump-like candidate. The past several election cycles have been this way. The party has sold their soul to MAGA style politics a long time ago.

    They just had the best showing ever in this election even though it was a loss. And this is with the best Trump wannabe candidate they’ve managed to field thus far. A belligerent authoritarian-like tyrant with zero shame. They are not going to stop this any more than the Republicans would to turn back from Trump. They may even keep the current guy even though he lost his own seat.

    Canada will inevitably elect a conservative government. It’s a defacto two party system. It will all go to hell. Especially if MAGA is still ruling America at the same time.




  • It doesn’t sit right with me either. A similar thing happened when the MPs who were accused of being agents of the Chinese government agents based on hearsay. When the news stories broke they were immediately dropped by the Liberal party.

    Years later it turned out to be a nothing burger. The courts found that the news outlets ran unsubstantiated stories. Independent commissions found no evidence of anything. Of course these news stories did not get any attention.

    That one MP Hang Dong just announced he isn’t running for re-election. So basically they ended his political career over nothing. Not many places you can say this but it looks like there’s a political purge of politicians of Chinese descent.





  • spector@lemmy.catoCanada@lemmy.caAnti Canadian sentiment
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    4 months ago

    I’ve been trying an experiment on r/onguardforthee. I block the belligerent reactionary accounts. You know what I’ve noticed. Not only are there repeat customers. Some of these accounts are playing both sides.

    It’s not uncommon to see a top comment presenting a popular rational take. Where some time ago I’ve blocked it because it’s a shit stirring right winger.

    They are also quite often the OP of top posts in the subreddit.



  • Ford is a Trump supporter. Republican wannabe. He’s just playing along. We’re watching WWE kayfabe.

    We’re as fucked as the Americans are. Maybe more. At least the 75 million who bothered to vote Democrat who don’t want any of this. One third of them know what’s going on. Meanwhile Ontario is still voting on pointless traditional small-c versus small-l partisan issues.

    I find myself uninvested in all this seeing how scripted it is. It’s distraction. I mean it’s been the Trump era MO for 10 years. Conservatives here love it. They’ve been cribbing notes. Why aren’t more people seeing it this way. The bluster. The table pounding. It’s all an act.

    Whatever the bigger picture ends up being in this great big geopolitical realignment. Canadians are in for very rude awakenings whenever they start realizing it isn’t anymore about nebulous partisan ideologies but fundamental shifts in the world we live in. If the notoriously boisterous Americans are asleep at their own wheel. Where does that leave us.


  • It’s not exactly accurate either. It’s not that Trudeau is “poison to the liberal brand”. American politics poisoned our politics. It’s true we vote out parties but this time the real shit is because of the poison pill of insane American politics.

    Back in 2011 the “liberal brand” was that of being relegated to the 3rd place party because they lost the election so bad. Trudeau was plucked out to be party leader. Some say reluctantly because they had no one else to lead it. We will never know the true behind closed doors story.

    The liberal brand or whatever was dog shit 20 years ago. Conservatives won the smallest minority government ever. Nobody wanted to vote for liberals. Nobody wanted to vote for conservatives. So the conservatives got about 10 years of government because of apathy.

    Trudeau was actually doing fine in roughly the first half of his leadership. Rescued them no longer being one half of the defacto two party system. Economy was doing good. Poverty was going down. Restored the census which conservatives killed off. Removed conservative censorship of scientists. Actual climate change policies. Got legal weed. Actually addressed social issues. Unlike the previous conservative government who were stoking proto-MAGA type divisiveness.

    Then the Trump era came into full swing and the conservative party adopted American culture wars. Then COVID and the economic+social fallout hit. So naturally all that is Trudeaus fault.

    Whoever is the unfortunate next leader of the liberal party will also be “poison” to the liberal brand. Because that’s how Americanized culture war politics works. They will ad hominem the next person to death. Elections will have absolutely zero policy and 100% culture war personal attacks.

    In another reality where America doesn’t go off the deep end Trudeau maybe even has few more years in office until getting voted out in a boring uneventful election where conservatives win another small minority. But no this is the insane timeline. Conservatives are headed to a resounding majority win because “MAGA” reasons.





  • spector@lemmy.catoFediverse memes@feddit.ukLemmy feels really busy to me
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    7 months ago

    The fediverse doesn’t need perpetual growth. That’s VC investor bullshit. You don’t need to be posting on a platform where the whole world is present. Again more corporate bullshit. As is the “digital town square” thing. It sounds profound but it’s pompous.

    What made the internet so good was variety. Which is what reddit seemed to offer in a time when the older paradigms namely message boards were becoming antiquated.

    What we got with the oligopoly of social platforms is watered down to memes and politics. It’s right wing cultural imperialism quite frankly. People have been battered into fear of being who they are online because in this age of centralized internet has made it a war to remove anything unacceptable (aka “woke”). There’s no variety. There’s nobody being themselves.

    The fedeverse will have arrived if it manages to achieve distinct varieties. On a technical basis it’s perfectly positioned to achieve this. Right now it’s largely just reddit clones offering little more than an extension of the cultural/political wars embroiling the handful of centralized social media platforms.