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  • Unfortunately, due to the piss-poor human condition, Canada - and every country on Earth that allows free speech - will go whatever direction the bots run by the nations that do NOT allow free speech want them to go. Anything else is a temporary reprieve.

    Boy, I sure didn't see that coming. It's going to be very interesting seeing where such a path ends. Uncomfortable, likely, but interesting.

    • Totally. I was thinking about China the other day, how crazy they seemed for building the Great Firewall fifteen years ago. I felt sad for their citizens being cutoff from the internet. Now I'm sitting here looking in and I'm all like - fuck, this has been a major contributor to their sovereignty. Both in that this allowed their own strong digital economy to develop instead of getting hooked on American Big Tech, and in that it keeps the propaganda that's threatening us at bay. I'm not saying that censorship is amazing all around but just like you said, had they gone with free speech online, they'd be subject to whatever Big Social makes money from that day. It's crazy how the tables have turned from this perspective. I'm not optimistic that there's a solution that both keeps speech free and protects us from this problem.

  • I think even worse than voting for fear and resentment, they voted for actual fascism. The guy openly stated that he was going to try to ignore Canadian rights and freedoms without any ambiguity. It's not like him twisting turning Canada into a 3rd world resource economy as a great boost to the economy, or that saving the 1% billions in taxes as a way for the average Canadian to save their money.

    One of PP's mandates was to use the notwithstanding clause to bypass Canadian rights and freedoms to jail people without a trial. It was one of his platforms, and there was zero ambiguity that he intended to do it exactly as he stated.

    The fact that this wasn't a red flag for over 40% of Canadians and an immediate reason to distance themselves from him, it honestly scares me. Because this is how Hitler and Mussolini came into power, along with many other of history's worst leaders. They sounded reasonable at first, with only one or two shady bits to their mandates, only for those shady bits to be the core that started the greatest evils in the world.

    • Before the election, I was able to see this multiple poll breakdown that was kind of surprising. If you were under 35 and male, you were more likely to have voted CPC. Every other group (esp. women under 35 and everyone over 65) was more likely to vote LPC. This tells me Poilievre's social media campaign, which you may recall was highly "manosphere"-coded was effective with the target group. The good news then is that (while not making the same mistake as the CPC and forgetting other demographics exist), we can reach these people with a smart approach online.

      I think Rational National has a good point in that video I linked that maybe these folks who were taken in by the Conservatives were under the impression because the Liberals were in charge as long as they can remember, everything is solely their fault. They're likely missing the overall historical context that we can't afford to keep the tax burden on poor people (especially as wages stagnate) instead of the rich (whose incomes have been exploding up until Trump's market crashes) as we've been doing increasingly for decades upon decades.

      • It certainly is possible. Most people have shitty memories for anything that they're not passionate about, and very few people are passionate about politics or how things change around them. Just the latest outrage article more often than not.

        But I do think that there is also a connection to the fact that the left is sorely underrepresented in social media as well. And I don't just mean in terms of content creators, but platform owners as well. After all, even if most tech bros that started up all our favourite online media giants, once they reach the top, every single force in the capatalistic world that let them get on top is now a force that drives them hard to the right. Legislation makes it harder to earn more money when you've already squeezed out the easy and legal opportunities. The left is all about change and democratizing things, where the corporate giants have already consolidated so much of the economy that this is a legitimate threat to their power. Not to mention that making it easier for entrepreneurs to start up new companies without relying on venture capital influence to avoid the risk of personal bankruptcy is a direct threat that may topple their empire if they can't buy them out (or will be bought by someone else who already is a direct threat).

        And then there's the fact that advertising money flock towards right wing content creators because not only are they more commercially safe since they are far less likely to call out corporations doing bad things, but they're also more willing to take money from unethical sources. I mean, how often does right wing youtubers advertise energy drinks and protein powders? Or what about supplements or "muscle enhancers"?

        The double whammy of right wing media giants and right wing content creators make it really hard for the left to get their voice out at all, especially to the young who exclusively get their news from these sources.

        I mean, imagine how many think that the stuff they hear on facebook is actual legitimate news despite them officially not allowing Canadian news to be advertised on their services?

  • we got in this morass because the neoliberal state and its accompanying economy financialized every damn thing

    The problem is monetary policy, not deregulation. Deregulation of zoning and housing policy would actually prevent monetary policy from creating such a large housing bubble.

    Our Bank of Canada targets a 2% inflation, which means prices need to continuously rise as technology actively reduces goods prices, and we then exclude investments and housing appreciation entirely, and we do hedonic adjustments to discount goods inflation. Then there's likely an element of shrinkflation, as company find tricks to cheapen products or degrade services, which lead to no inflation in the CPI but higher profits and then lower prices.

    So the money supply needs to grow via low interest rates, in order to provide a windfall to boomers to encourage them sell their real estate holdings, to create new bank loans, to increase the money supply, which turns into aggregate demand, in order to create inflation in the CPI.

    But we can't build enough houses due to reverse neo-liberalism, so housing acts as liquidity sponges for cheap debt, and people hold them as investments in perpetuity since they think prices are always going to go up. Also as interest rates fall inflation falls, as interest expense is included in the CPI while housing appreciation is not, its a feedback loop due to its poorly constructed nature. The Bank of Canada now also buys half of all mortgage bonds to attempt to reverse this, so they're actually printing money in order to cause deflation funnily enough, again due to the absurd way the CPI is constructed.

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