Zephyr
12d 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
13d 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
20d 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
23d 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.
Zephyr
24d ago
The argument is that if imprisonment for life costs the government money, they look for alternatives (and if that weren't true, activists wouldn't attempt to make the death penalty so expensive - so it's not a completely out there theory, at least).
Yes, there are people who we probably both agree should never be free again. I'd say in an ideal world, we should be able to remove them from our society. However, I don't think that the way our governments have evolved have led to them being good stewards of this power. A more local government system would probably work better - where the person deciding knows the person being punished. Are they an incorrigible bastard, or someone down on their luck? The blind eye of justice can't be trusted to make that decision, especially with politics involved.
I honestly am kind of against life imprisonment as well - I think a lot of people underestimate how time trades off against punishment. I feel like the visceral nature of the punishment needs to remain to remind people that the punishment needs to be deserved. One problem I see happen a lot with punishments is the "hate crime" clause - where everyone tries to get their crime treated as super duper evil so the perpetrators need to receive longer sentences. I honestly think that punishments should be bloody and horrible to separate out the "punishment" part of justice from the "prevention" part, so that jail exists solely to keep people from hurting others (and can be sentenced independent to the punishment).
Zephyr
26d ago
Certainly, happy to.
My belief is that once MAID becomes an option, the government immediately and irrevocably takes the approach of funneling all its resources towards MAID-ing people, as opposed to resolving the underlying issues behind the issue (as it is almost always the cheaper option).
For example, we have had numerous scandals in Canada where the government has offered MAID as a response to:
- Veterans who have slipped through the cracks (usually due to inadequate supports post-military career).
- People who are lonely or isolated.
- People who cannot receive medical assistance due to an overburdened healthcare system.
The first fairly clearly falls under the domain of the government; the third falls under the government's responsibility, as they take roughly $8000 CAD per person in taxes to make such a garbage system. The second is less obvious, and I would agree the connection is tenuous; however, I'm fairly certain that the reason people feel so isolated and atomized is due to the cost of living crisis, which leads to a situation where most people are working huge hours and are just too exhausted to try to meet people after a long day.
The government of Canada has made statements that indicate that they want to expand MAID to people suffering from mental illness; they have also made statements that indicate that they want to expand the eligibility of MAID to people suffering from mental illnesses that do not permit consent (for example, schizophrenia or alzheimers). This strikes me as a worrying combination.
Note that I don't have any complaints about someone who is in indescribable pain choosing to end their own life; I just don't believe that the government should have any say in permitting it or not. Honestly, if I were to put a safeguard on it, I'd say that anyone who claims MAID can choose any public minister who receives it simultaneously to them (I realize the chances of this being implemented is less than 0; I just don't want a situation where the government is encouraged or permitted to destroy its own citizens). I'd be worried that the government would inflict circumstances on individuals who it should be supporting in an attempt to remove them.
Zephyr
27d ago
I guess I'll make an argument against the death penalty, as I haven't heard anyone make this argument yet in this thread.
The biggest reason I personally can see to oppose the death penalty is that no government can be trusted with life or death powers over its citizens, as every government serves only its own interests, as opposed to the interests of its peoples (for what it's worth, this also means I am opposed to eugenics, MAID, and similar programs). Given that around 50% of the time, the government is run entirely by people I would consider to have morally abhorrent views (while the majority of the remaining time, it seems to be run by people who are solely interested in enriching themselves), I'd rather not have someone deciding that posting wrongthink is worthy of death, while sexual assault of a child warrants a second chance, all because of who did it.
Zephyr
1mo ago
"I'm not gay, but $50 is $50."
The greater the welfare is, the easier it is to stomach your pride. There are a lot of things (few of which I'm proud of) that I'd do for even as little as a year's salary.
Zephyr
1mo ago
But what possible reason does Canada have for doing so poorly?
Of the many things people have said about Trudeau, no one has ever called him competent.
Zephyr
1mo ago
I find this such an alien viewpoint; once writing has reached a (fairly low) bar, I find it to not really matter towards my enjoyment of a book.
The part of the book I have always felt matters is what it says, not how it says it. Caring about the quality of the writing seems like receiving a gift, and discarding it because the wrapping paper was poorly chosen.
I found ASOIAF to be utterly predictable, save for the character deaths (which I suppose is a twist, in its own right). Someone like Feist, Sanderson, or Cook may have flaws in how they write, but the stories themselves are way more interesting to me.
I don't know where you can read more on it, but I can provide more evidence in that direction.
From my experiences, the Cluster B disorders tend to fall out (roughly) in this fashion.
Antisocial - male dominated (used to be called sociopathy). Tends towards anger as it's primary emotion. Borderline - female dominated (I've heard it called, derogatorily, "crazy bitch disease"). Tends towards fear of abandonment. Histrionic - slightly female biased. Doesn't get a lot of media attention (think of like, the mothers of child stars). Tends towards performative actions (my mother, who fell into this bucket, would run away from home every Christmas and make the whole family persuade her to return). Narcissistic - male biased. Extreme selfishness which is expressed as unending need.
Edit: I just realized all of the above sound extremely similar, so let me provide an example.
If you were, for example, trying to go out for an evening:
- Someone with Antisocial personality disorder would say it's fine, but would break something (or someone) to force you to stay.
- Someone with Borderline personality disorder would hurt themselves, or send increasingly scary messages indicating that they are going to until you stay.
- Someone with Histronic personality disorder would make a huge fuss about you leaving, and how much they do for you (and may pack up everything and leave, or sell all your stuff, or whatever).
- Someone with Narcissistic personality disorder would tell you that you cannot, and tell you how much you are hurting them until you return.
All of the above fall into cluster B behaviors, so it's not like they're exclusive to one or another; it just tends to be the predominant form of expression.
Zephyr
2mo ago
Oh, sorry, I may have been unclear - I am not a progressive. My comment was simply a model of how I think they would respond in this circumstance.
Zephyr
2mo ago
Wouldn't the obvious stance be "we aren't the progressives of the past?" Residential schools have plenty of evidence towards their existence in Canada, and were certainly pushed by what would've been a progressive mindset back in the day.
I think by their very nature, conservatives are more tied to the past of their movement than progressives are. I don't think it'd be memory holed - it would simply be treated as "how awful that society did this - good thing we are making progress to change the horrors of the past"
Zephyr
2mo ago
I mean, it's obvious to you that this is the exact same thing as "old school" multiplication - I don't think it's obvious to the average person (including teachers!)
A lot of people really just don't "get" math. Back in high school, I remember noticing at one point that 9 x 7 was one less than 8 x 8, 8 x 6 was one less than 7 x 7, etc. I remember going through a bunch of examples trying to figure out why this was - and ended up discovering the x^2 - 1 = (x + 1)(x - 1) equality that had been taught to me like 3 years prior. It hadn't even occurred to me that the equality represented something real - they were just symbols to manipulate. And I was considered to be really good at math!
So for someone who half-remembers their old math lessons, the new stuff just looks insane.
I'm also not stating this is all that's wrong with it - this just happens to be what I'm familiar with
Zephyr
2mo ago
From my experience with it, Common Core is the attempt to make people do "mental math". Instead of multiplying 12 x 13, you instead multiply (10 x 13) + (2 x 13).
The problems with it are:
- The teachers don't really get it (I was tutoring a child who got a question wrong because they did (3 x 12) + (10 x 12) instead of the above. I've seen numerous examples where the answer key has it broken down differently than I would've, and the teacher has dogmatically marked it wrong even with the right answer.
- Parents (many of whom hated math) now feel that they can't help their children with their homework.
- It doesn't actually make people better at mental math (my experience was that it was just more steps for the average kid, not something that they applied outside the classroom).
I'd describe it as similar to communism - in a world where everyone behaves well and knows what they're doing, it's superior. In reality, you get a mess.
Zephyr
3mo ago
For the record, I agree with you, but there is some irony in saying that when it comes to asking someone out for dates, the more interested party should do so, but when asking someone for marriage, the more reluctant party should instead.
Zephyr
3mo ago
Well, if we did this to the Indians, it's only fair that the Indians get to do it to us.
More seriously, I think that especially among young Canadians, there is a sense that progressive policies have failed. As I write this, I'm walking by a sign advertising our local progressive party (The NDP). The sign sits in front of a number of tents containing the homeless (or "unhoused people"). 9 years ago, when I moved into this neighborhood, it was still not a good neighborhood, but there weren't visible crack pipes, dirty needles, or homeless people shrieking profanities all through the night. The BC NDP decriminalizing drugs has visibly led to an explosion in the homeless population and general appearance of decay.
I live in a rent controlled building. My rent is around $1200 CAD monthly, compared to what would be around $2700 CAD if I were to move in today. The progressive party has failed at keeping life affordable for the middle class (and their federal counterparts literally voted to keep increasing demand on housing.)
What I think has happened is that the youth have reached a point where it is literally impossible to survive with the progressive policies. The insulation that the standard progressive has against the negative repercussions of their policies has been worn away, and when they cry uncle, the government they elected doubles down on the policies hurting them.
It's easy to be progressive when it just means being nice. It's much harder when it means that you rent a tiny shoebox for the rest of your life, and can't start a family, or travel, or do anything but eck out an existence for the corporate overlords the progressives swear they opposed, but who somehow keep doing better and better. And all the while, the government keeps upping taxes, but somehow they're all gone by the time you're supposed to see them.
Zephyr
5mo ago
I've always seen conflict vs mistake theory as being about what you believe the other person in the disagreement is thinking. A mistake theorist believes that their opponent is making an error in reasoning, while a conflict theorist believes that their opponent is motivated to support their side.
I think designating people as purely one or the other is silly, but it doesn't make the framework useless for looking at why people support what they do.
Zephyr
8mo ago
Unfortunately, I think this runs into the same sort of issues that the foreign student process does.
For anyone who isn't aware, Canada requires that foreign students demonstrate that they have enough money to support themselves for the time that they enrolled. It sounds like a good plan, but:
- The amount is laughably low (it was $10,000 CAD until very recently - for reference, rent averages around $2100 a month for a 1 bedroom in my city).
- The verification is only done once; the government checks if you have the funds once, then never checks again. There's an obvious loophole (that has been exploited) of people getting very temporary loans to pass the check.
- The government has no interest in pursuing individuals who blatantly abuse the system - a recent estimate had about 1 in 40 people in Canada being present from overstaying visas, for example.
My concern with the grandparents is that "supporting" their grandparents does not actually reflect all the services that they consume (healthcare, primarily), and even if it did, the government isn't going to do anything about it.
Zephyr
9mo ago
That seems very strongly related, although it isn't the one I read back in the day. Thanks for sharing!
Zephyr
9mo ago
In addition to the size of the staff, you also have the costs of the game exploding; one of the interesting side effects of this is has been that anything put into the game has to become accessible to anyone who has the game (or they've wasted a lot more real money than they would have before).
A long time ago, I remember reading a definition of the 'types' of gamers; although I cannot for the life of me track it down, I can remember that some of them were as follows:
- Immersion - the feeling of being a part of the game, and the story.
- Subsumption - the feeling of being a passenger, carried along by the story.
- Agency/Power Fantasy - the feeling of influencing the world.
- Exploration - the feeling of discovering the unknown, and finding things no one else had.
- Challenge - the feeling of overcoming adversity.
(you'd assume that with this much detail, I'd easily be able to track it down, but alas, no luck).
I am pretty sure that the strategy of making all content in the game accessible to anyone ends up alienating players who enjoy challenge and exploration. I could also see arguments as to how anyone who enjoys immersion and power fantasy would end up feeling dissatisfied too - I just don't personally find those as critical in my enjoyment of games, so can't comment.
Although it may be cherry-picking a little bit, I think it's fairly obvious that a lot of what makes some games into a sudden and surprising success is that they tap into one or more of these markets that are just not being explored by the mainstream.
- Dark Souls (and its sequels) really cannot be beaten until you 'git gud' enough to overcome the levels.
- Outer Wilds explicitly lets you figure out how to beat the game on your own, with the in-game guidance being extremely minimal.
- Something like Baldur's Gate 3 is extremely good at reacting to most decisions you can make.
I think a lot of people rush to defend the plot to these games because the plot literally feels better when it's acting in support of the feeling that you want to get from the game. Unless you are a Subsumption (and possibly Immersion) gamer, you become interested in the plot when your other wants are being met.
Zephyr
9mo ago
So one of the things that I think a lot of people don't really realize is just how messed up a bunch of families are, especially in ways that aren't intuitively obvious. There's a reason that the stereotypical 'instance' of a therapist is some elderly man saying "Tell me about your mother." - the way kids are raised can really screw up their relationships with reality. Kids are fairly hardwired to love their parents; they are basically unable to conceive of the fact that their parents disliked hated abused were not ideal to them.
There are basically 2 & 1/2 ways that I have seen how kids can react to severely traumatic experiences, which boil down to what I'll call relitigation, reproduction, and repression (note that these probably have real names, I'm not a psychologist).
Relitigation
In this situation, kids basically attempt to reproduce the situation that is too traumatizing to process in such a way that they are now in control of it. The stereotypical example here is of a man who was severely beaten as a boy, so beats his wife/kids as well. This is where the stereotype of bullies having low self-esteem, or being victims, tends to come from. There was a very sad picture posted last week of a man's boss yelling at him, who yelled at his wife, who yelled at her kid, who yelled at his cat; this is that behaviour.
Reproduction
This is the "1/2" of the above (I spent a lot of time wavering on whether to include it as part of the first category); in this situation, the child in question basically 'accepts' that the situation at hand is how love is expressed, and attempts to replicate it in their own life. The standard example here tends to be the girl who was sexually abused tends to end up as someone who overtly sexualizes herself; a warning sign of sexual abuse amongst teachers and similar mandatory reporting professions tends to be kids who do sexual things to get what they want (think, for example, of a 10-year-old who begins to strip if you tell her 'no' - it sounds horrifying, but I've seen it happen).
Repression
Unlike the popular conception, repression doesn't mean completely blocking out an experience; instead, under a repressive system, a child will instead block out all emotional valence from a bad experience. From my experiences in this category, you end up with children who tell 'funny' stories that absolutely do not hit the mark. Things like:
"Yeah, I was kind of mouthy when I was 7; at one point, when I was being a brat, my parents threatened to drown me if I didn't stop swearing. I called them 'shitheads' to their face, and after 5 minutes in the sink, I'd learned my lesson."
or
"When my dad decided (at age 5) that it was time for us to learn about the birds and the bees, he got me and my younger brother to watch one of his pornos."
Although that may sound horrifying to anyone with a normal childhood, that is just sort of the way that people with highly distorted childhood's think. They can recognize that it's weird, but they tend to think of it as 'funny' as opposed to 'awful'.
So the reason I bring all 3 of these up is that all 3 of them can become, in the parlance of rationalists, 'Trapped Priors'. The problem with a lot of them is that they're self-reinforcing; someone stuck in the reproduction mindset will tend to find people who are not interested in mimicking their abusive past boring, for example. The major area in which therapy is actually useful is in breaking these patterns; in an ideal situation, a therapist will identify what the negative pattern is, identify a way to counter it, and, well, train the individual in question to do so.
The problems with it are fairly straightforward:
- The solution to a repression is not the same as a solution to a reproduction, which differs still from the solution to a relitigation.
- The types aren't cleanly split; someone can easily exhibit all 3 traits, and the 'obvious' trait may not actually be the one that needs to be treated (think here of someone who was, say, consistently starved as a child; they may repress the severity of the parents' behaviour, but mentally replace their parents with their own voice telling them not to eat in modern times. Were you to attempt to convince them that it's okay to be hungry, you'd find that they'd be incredibly resistant to it, because the actual thing that you are trying to overcome is the belief that they are only worthy of human love if they are not eating).
- (Mediocre) therapists have an incentive to keep clients as long as possible, instead of attempting to cure them.
- The therapeutic tools used are designed to change patterns of thinking; there is nothing preventing them from changing healthy -> unhealthy, even if they are intended for the inverse.
- When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail; the skill to identify someone who needs aid is completely independent from the skill to successfully apply therapy skills.
I think that what we're seeing is the fairly standard loop of humans identifying a 'miracle cure-all', applying it way too broadly, and badly, and then eventually reaching the stage where we recognize it as a useful tool, and not an 'all the time' sort of thing. We've seen this before with radioactive material, and we'll see it again; it seems to be a familiar loop our brains get caught in.
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).
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