Zephyr
11d ago
I mean, this coalition is willing to burn cities and churches because of misinformation (the number of unarmed black men killed my cops is estimated to be around two magnitudes higher than it actually is, and they destroyed around 50 churches in Canada because of a moral panic around mass graves that never unearthed even a single bone). What makes you think they aren’t willing to use violence against their outgroup?
Zephyr
11d ago
The issue is that the government will only perform the death penalty on those that would be the army of their opponents, not their own. A left wing government would give slap on the wrist sentences to those that perform left wing coded violence, while bringing the full force of the law down on those that commit right wing coded violence (and vice versa is true too).
The advantage to “the government can’t kill anyone” is that it removes it’s discretion to do this - there are always ways for a government to avoid prosecuting those in its favour.
Zephyr
11d ago
I meant mean tweets as shorthand for any politically incorrect speech; and I live in Canada, not in the United States.
Remember that Britain (for example) spent state resources prosecuting someone for misgendering their rapist.
It’s actually not that hard to reach a state where the state could justify it. If words are “literally violence,” it is fairly straightforward to make the case that mean words towards a minority group is exactly what Hitler did (even without the literal violence clause, you could claim that the person in question is encouraging violence and erasure, which is literally genocide).
Zephyr
11d ago
I’m on record as opposing the death penalty not because of any high minded ideals, nor because I want an army of thugs in reserve, but because the government is entirely untrustworthy. I can easily picture a government deciding that mean tweets warrant the death penalty, while something like assault warrants nothing more than a slap on the wrist.
In theory, not having the death penalty allows for a future government, or the people themselves, to rectify things in the future in the way that the death penalty doesn’t. If society was less bifurcated in their beliefs, I could see it being more of value (as people could more consistently agree on the targets of violence).
In general, though, I’m very much in favour of anything that limits a government’s power - people with a monopoly on violence should be severely limited on what else they can do, lest they use violence to seize all else in life.
Zephyr
18d ago
One thing that annoys me a lot is that I don’t even think Poilievre was slow to denounce the tariffs or other Trump policies (I recall seeing articles about him denouncing them the day they were announced) - I feel like the internet (generously aided by what was probably an advertising blitz for Carney) decided to ignore it.
One thing that happens in Canadian politics is that as a conservative, you do not have any of the leeway granted to a LPC or NDP candidate. Most donations to the LPC are close to the donation limit, and they facilitate the largest transfer of wealth out of the middle class? Well obviously the CPC is the party of neo-feudalism and big business. LPC candidate literally raised from birth to be prime minister with a multi-million trust fund while the CPC candidate was adopted and raised by a middle class family? Clearly the CPC candidate is the elitist.
It’s really frustrating how little people seem to react to the facts on their own. Someone who votes for Carney because he doesn’t care for Poilievre is infinitely more palatable to me than someone who votes for Carney because Poilievre is secretly in the pocket of big business.
Zephyr
26d ago
For what it’s worth, Japan did not have the issues with vagrants and crazy people on their trains - instead, we were packed in like sardines with people so close that I couldn’t hold my arms flat against my sides without touching someone (and I was noticeably a foreigner and a man - my sister had it far worse). I’d take time spent in traffic over the subway any day of the week.
Zephyr
26d ago
Genuine question - how do you tangibly improve on the Doom gameplay formula?
Probably the easiest way is in level and enemy design. I’d actually say that boltgun does a good job at feeling like Doom, but with dramatically better level and enemy design.
You could also argue something like Halo was a different type of improvement over the same - the auto recovering health creates a different feel to the game. You can design encounters for someone who is always at full strength, which allows for a different feel.
You can also take the remnant approach, and add in coop multiplayer. An experience where you approach encounters as a team can lead to an entirely different feel.
Even if the core of “you are a person with a gun” doesn’t change, you can create dramatically different feels by iterating on some common variables.
The main issue I’d say that comes up with modern games is that they all feel like they’re trying to saturate the same market. Dark Souls isn’t that innovative of a design - but it was a popular enough series to spawn its own “genre”, simply because it scratched an itch modern games won’t. There aren’t enough games where you can look for secrets, overcome challenges or get lost in the world - instead, games are very focused on making sure you experience it in the exact way the developers intended.
Zephyr
27d ago
Honestly, if Canada was 110% on board with Trudeau as our leader? Trump would drop it immediately. He hates Trudeau for being sanctimonious and a huge example of the “respectable” politicians that talk down to him and consider him a threat to democracy.
Zephyr
1mo ago
My suspicion as to why Liberalism was weak to wokeness was twofold.
- The average person believes that society was wrong about homosexuality. As such, when a new movement that professes to be like the gay movement arises, they're very eager to show they wouldn't have made the same mistakes as their predecessors. (There's a major difference between someone who is gay, lesbian, or bisexual, and someone who is queer/LGBTQ+ - I'm referring to the former group on terms of what the average person would accept).
- The right wing still carries a lot of baggage from some specific forms of christians. A very common life path is someone who is raised in a religious environment, then goes to university. People who are less intelligent who follow rules tend to enforce them without understanding the purpose behind them (for example, at work you could have a procedure to set the printer page delay to 15 seconds because the color ink doesn't dry quickly - someone intelligent would know a black and white print could have no delay, while someone less intelligent would do it every time). As a result, the kids who go to university feel that there are no redeeming factors to christianity, and feel it represents the right.
I think that if wokeness suffers a hearts and minds defeat, as opposed to what Trump is doing, it actually would be possible to go back to liberalism. We'd have in our cultural milieu a reference to leftism going insane, which would produce antibodies against the empathy spirals that the current left uses.
That being said, I don't think that we are currently on that trajectory - I think that Trump (like Biden and Obama) is projecting a culture change top down, and that we have too much of a bifurcation in beliefs to return to it yet. I honestly think that a very major country (like, G7) has to fall specifically from wokeness (similar to the fall of the Soviet Union) before we can see the potential for it to return.
Zephyr
1mo ago
I don't disagree with you in that it is definitely a skill issue; I just don't trust a government to ever do better.
Zephyr
1mo ago
If it helps, I'm Canadian, and the Indians we get are not considered to be very hard workers.
Zephyr
1mo ago
Can you provide more information on this? I'm curious what proportion is, as I'd assume it'd be fairly close intuitively, and I've never seen anything otherwise.
Zephyr
1mo ago
Also as a software engineer, I take the exact opposite approach; close the borders right up. Importing lots of people puts a strain on resources in the host country, and counteracts the will of the native population in favour of "GDP line go up" type thinking.
Indians in Canada are willing to live in situations that are a massive downgrade in QOL to the non-immigrant population - Brampton is famous for having slums with 20+ Indian individuals packed into a tiny apartment. It isn't rights that prevents them from doing better - it's that it is still an upgrade for them.
Zephyr
1mo ago
There seems to be a strain of people who absolutely cannot look past labels in any way. I recently read a highly upvoted comment on Imgur (which is extremely left wing) which went something like:
"Remember when they tried to call Antifa a terrorist organization? It's proof they're fascists that they're so afraid of an antifacist idea!"
The people in question seem absolutely unable to see that you can make up your own names for things, and people are absolutely not bound to follow them.
To tie it into the point above - I'd argue that a salient comparison with Antifa would be the National Socialists Party of Germany's Brown shirts - but the sort of people who claim that all of their opponents are Nazis can't even see the comparison, because their opponents are the Nazis, not them, and Nazis used the brown shirts.
I mean, to turn the question on it's head - is there any evidence that would persuade you that it is caused (or at least, worsened) by immigration? From my perspective, it doesn't have to be caused solely by it in order for it to be aggrevating the situation.
An important thing to remember is that Canada has had approximately 1/8 of its residents added in the last 5 years (2019 census has 37.5 million population, 2024 has 41.8, but there was also a report that approximately 1 million people had overstayed their visas). During that time, I've seen housing prices go up by around 65%. (The place I'm buying was last listed at 315k in 2019, and is 485 today). The housing market began to get out of control with Harper, who dramatically expanded the TFW program; with Trudeau, who went into overdrive with TFW and international students, it became way worse.
Every province in Canada is currently suffering from this, regardless of their provincial leaders. We've had a dramatic increase in coethnic violence, including marches to support Hamas and similar groups.
We had a fairly big outrage recently over Indian international students raiding food banks for meals - this directly reduces the resources available for our population that uses them (which has gone up to about 20% of the population).
Do you think it's possible that immigration could be making things worse for the average person? I can't find you definitive proof that this is the sole cause of every word, because it isn't - all I can do is show you the ways we can see direct negatives from it.
Zephyr
2mo ago
Sorry to pile on here, as I'm already engaging with you in a different thread; wouldn't your theories only make sense in a hypothetical world where we had an extremely high labour force engagement? Like, if we only have around 65% of the population of working aged individuals engaging in the labour market, doesn't that imply that adding a marginal person does not generate a marginal job (but rather, 65% of one)?
Zephyr
2mo ago
But I mean, this is not what we actually see; what you are expressing is what we keep getting told will be the case with immigration, but somehow never actually seems to materialize. When I was a child, I had a family doctor; now, I'm part of roughly 20% of my province that does not, and the lineup to get a family doctor is in the range of years. When I was a kid, the weekly grocery bill was around $100 CAD for a 5 person family per week; it's now around $100 CAD for a single person. This is far in excess of nominal inflation.
The time horizons matter too; I'm currently 33, and moving into a place that is not big enough to raise a family. If the immigration jobs end up stabilizing in 5 years, I'll be 38; if I wanted a family with 5 kids, I'm kind of out of time at that point. It doesn't actually matter to me if everything will be better in 5 years; I only have one life.
I think your theories only make sense if the only immigration is net contributors (people who are likely to pay more taxes than they consume); however, Canada supports both spousal unification, as well as family unification (including the extremely elderly). We also have an average wage of $49000 for new immigrants (as opposed to the $55000 for native Canadians). As such, the immigrants are literally making us poorer on a per-person basis, driving up the cost of our resources that cannot grow at the same pace as immigration (housing, health care), and bringing their racial and ethnic tensions to our streets. Our GDP may be higher than it would've without them; but that doesn't help when my wage doesn't go up, and everything is more expensive (and in Canada, our GDP per capita has actually gone down).
The issue here is that if you are someone who makes their living providing labour, it's a very bad thing for you to have more labour in the pool.
If a job needs to be done, and I am one of the few people who can do it, I have much better leverage than if I am one of the many people who can. This is a very classic leftist argument (see union shops).
On a personal note, housing is one of the areas where it really affects me. 25 years ago, the house my parents bought was a 5 bed 2 bath with an unfinished basement for $200000. With 2% inflation, it would be around $375000 today. Instead, it's around $3000000. At the same age my parents were moving into a great home in a wonderful neighborhood, I'm moving into a tiny condo in a cheaper city, for over double the cost of the house I grew up in. I am Canadian, as I've mentioned before - so the level of immigration I've seen is way above that of the US. But it's one of those problems that scales linearly over time - the more people you allow in without increasing services (everything from doctors, employees at the local DMV, all the way down to lanes on roads), the more everyone who needs those services has their quality of life decrease.
Edit: A word, I meant "Decrease", not "Improve".
Zephyr
3mo ago
Out of curiosity, where would you say the appropriate place to protest would have been? There was behaviour during the election that seemed very suspicious to the layperson (the water main breaking causing poll watchers to be sent home, which was followed by votes continuing to be tallied). The attempts to get the legal system to address it seemed to be brushed off (and I'm saying 'seemed', not 'were', because you don't have to be right to protest, you just need to believe something was wrong). The people absolutely believed that the election has been stolen, and showed up for what was actually an extremely peaceful protest, especially compared to the BLM protests earlier in the year.
We've seen similar protests from left-wing sources occupying state buildings to prevent votes (unfortunately, not being American, I can't recall the specific state; I believe it was some sort of trans bathroom bill that caused a Texan legislature to have to reconvene later, but I'm open to corrections if someone can find it). The same people who complain about Trump being a unique threat to democracy are silent on those protests.
There really isn't any set of events that could've led to the January 6 protests having Trump installed in office, short of convincing everyone that the vote had been stolen (in which case, yes, they would've been right to overturn it).
Zephyr
3mo ago
Not that I disagree, but I think the argument is more like "last time you all screamed he was orange Hitler, and nothing happened. Why should we believe you this time?"
There's a current amongst the left that makes the most recent right wing candidate out to be literally the biggest threat to democracy ever. After a while, it becomes obvious that there isn't any information value from these statements.
Zephyr
3mo ago
The obvious theory is that they wanted to prevent a recession. Every government believes that "triggered a recession" is synonymous with "kicked out by voters".
Most governments overspent on lockdown supports, and lifted them way too late (by which I mean, put them into place at all). The money they spent was often injected into the economy directly (by subsidising demand), and when the market came to equalize it, they panicked and brought in as many people as possible to keep things GDP line rising (Canada has had around 1-3% population growth, but a GDP growth of around -0.5 - 0.5% - it's fairly obvious we'd be in a recession if they hadn't imported somewhere around 3 million people in the last two years (for reference, with a population of 40 million, 3 million people is around 8%, or roughly 1 in 12 people in the country).
Zephyr
3mo ago
It's not just interest rates doubling. Inflation tends to be calculated on a "basket of goods" system, where (in an ideal world) they try to react to trends in the real world by determining how much of a product the average consumer is purchasing in a year. For example, if there is a bad year for pork, most people will buy more chicken/steak, so it doesn't make sense to claim that the average person experienced the full inflation of the pork shortage.
The problems are:
- The people calculating the basket of goods know that bad inflation numbers will act against the current government.
- The basket of goods can accept inferior substitutions without reflecting that the quality of the good has gone down.
So people can feel their quality of life is getting worse because steak is outside their reach due to inflation, but the basket of goods now contains ground beef at the price steal used to be. If the government in power is favored by the bureaucracy, they can also choose to include irrelevant items, or exclude items that are relevant, to make the numbers more favorable (electronics tend to be cheaper over time, so they're a good one to use to balance the numbers if another category is too high). And with electronics especially, it's very easy to selectively say inflation is negative (the iPhone 12 has a better camera than the iPhone 11, but was the same price on launch - that represents a deflation rate of 6%!)
Four years ago, a bag of potato chips was around $3.99 CAD, with the expensive brand being $4.50. Looking at the same thing today, it's $6.39 for the cheap brand, and $8.49 for the expensive one. Inflation has far exceeded the official government numbers, especially for food.
Zephyr
3mo ago
If it helps, remember that I live in Canada - I tend to come to these things from that perspective. We've had a rash of judges appointed by our unpopular liberal government who have been letting criminals out who should definitely not be free (it's not uncommon to see people who have 50+ arrests be brought in for going on a stabbing spree, for example). The disadvantage to a large government is that when it gets corrupted, there is no way to push back on it - it doesn't matter that the LPC may not win any seats in western Canada, we're still governed by their choices.
These judges are utterly immune to public perception - short of performing some fedposting activities, there is no consequence to their actions. One of the hopes of making these things extremely local would be to either enforce consequences on the judges, or to allow people to flee jurisdictions in which the judges have proven to not be acting in the best interest in their community.
Ideally, I'd like to see something more like Scott's archipelago.
With regards to physical punishments - the purpose of that is actually more to get people to actually treat the punishment and the restraining parts of justice differently - I could honestly see an argument that most crimes don't receive any physical punishments at all. I think right now the problem with it is that putting someone in jail is both a way to punish them, and to prevent them from offending again. When you have people like the above (50+ arrests), it makes sense to treat them as someone who is at high risk of reoffending, even if none of their original crimes warrants that harsh of a punishment.
You don’t need to declare that hate speech, and only hate speech, warrants the death penalty- you only need to declare that it too warrants it, then fail to prosecute cases that would otherwise warrant it if against a favoured group.
I live in Canada, not in the United States - we have an extremely activist judiciary here, imposed on Western Canada by Ottawa and Quebec. It would not surprise me in the slightest if they went this route, as we’ve already seen them declare that race and gender must be considered in sentencing. If all you care about is the states, you probably know more than I do, and I defer to your judgement. However, I’m talking about what I’ve seen in non-US systems, where we have “disadvantaged” individuals who have committed stabbing sprees released immediately - I don’t know why you don’t think the left would use this, given that disparate impact is literally part of their public justification for DEI and similar initiatives.
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