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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: January 8th, 2024

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  • Honestly, a lot of people are quite happy seeing this happening because Trudeau is becoming immensely unpopular.

    The Conservatives lost the last election in part because they weren’t presenting a differing vision of how to run the country. The PPC got more votes than the green party in the last election in part as a protest vote because Erin O’Toole got off to a good start by contrasting his worldview to the Liberal Party worldview, but as the election neared he started to pivot the Conservatives into liberal lite while Trudeau steered the liberal party into being the more leftist NDP. I said at the time that we had a choice between the red NDP, the blue NDP, the orange NDP, the Separatists, the PPC, and the green NDP.

    Besides the PPC, the other option on the ballot was staying at home watching Netflix, and if people got the impression they were going to get the exact same stuff, Netflix would win the election.

    Poilievre is hammering hard on the differences between how he wants to run the country and how Trudeau has because that’s what a lot of people need to see. They’re going to be mobilized to get out there if and only if they think heading to the polls next October actually stands a chance of changing something. They don’t want the Liberal party Lite, they want someone who they think is going to try to get the car back on the car because it hit the ditch a long time ago and we’ve been driving through some farmer’s field for several years now.

    As a study in contrasts, the NDP’s Singh barks like a little Pomeranian dog, and he’s shown the entire country he’s a lap dog living in Justin’s purse. He’ll bark, but then he’ll accept a treat from his master and do as he’s told. That’s why the NDP isn’t doing much better than it is despite the Liberals getting killed in the polls.

    Now, do I worry that Poilievre will take this dickish nature into being Prime Minister and then start to take it out on Canadians similar to how Trudeau already does? Of course, that would be really bad. On the other hand, people across the country want to feel like someone is standing up for them, and this to me looks like that strategy at work. Trudeau is an abusive leader, so it’s appropriate to push back.


  • Far too late for that.

    Justin Trudeau spoke of anyone who disagreed with him with all kinds of names. Racist, sexist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, American, Russian, or bots. He called people who disagreed with him a “fringe minority”. He spoke of how upset he was at the unvaccinated “taking up space”.

    You might like him, but he’s acted how he’s acted, and the entire world saw.

    You might be thinking “Oh, this stupid conservative for life loser, what does he know?” – Well that’s fine to think, but I voted for Chretien’s liberals, and I voted for Martin’s liberals, and I voted against Harper’s conservatives, and supported Trudeau in 2015 because I’m a liberal, and over the past 8 years I’ve gotten to learn Trudeau isn’t one.


  • Yeah, and it’s not because it’s diversity but because it’s more about the message than about the art – you remember ever watching one of those horrible Christian movies? Very few were even watchable because they were so busy literally sermonizing. That’s fine, but it makes for crappy movies.

    And on the other side of that, there’s lots of works out there that integrate Christianity as a theme that are first and foremost about making something good, and often they’re awesome.


  • https://youtu.be/5Iby1gVnBXo

    Your post contains a potential basic logical fallacy. “A is B, therefore it is also C”

    There’s a couple old songs that investigate such fallacies and how they can apply to a legal context. “I shot the sheriff” describes a criminal who admits to shooting the sheriff but it was justified, but did not shoot the deputy. Another song, “Hurricane” by Bob Dylan similarly tells the story about a guy who happened to be at a crime scene, and was robbing the register, but did not commit the murders found at the same crime scene. It’s a story about an actual black man who claims he faces systemic racism in his prosecution and was seeking justice. The man the second song was about got a second trial and the conviction stood, but in 1985 the conviction was reversed based on the idea that he did not receive a fair trial due to racism.

    I don’t think that anyone can deny that Weinstein is creep, and we’ve all heard the recordings, we know that he’s a sex pest, but is he a rapist? He can be guilty of many things, including abusing his position as a powerful person in media in a way that is not allowable under labor laws, but the time of his trial, everyone on the face of the Earth had heard the media effectively complaining that he was guilty of any sex crime that they could throw at him. Regardless of the facts of the case, how could you possibly get a fair trial under some circumstances? Him being a sex pest ended up becoming a flashpoint for an entire social movement #metoo that took the entire world by storm shortly after, being the face of social movement like that how exactly are you supposed to get a fair trial?

    He did things wrong, again there’s no doubting that, but in the same way that the hurricane could not get a fair trial in the racist 1970s America, even if Harvey Weinstein was pure as the driven snow which I am accepting he not, what’s your name and face is synonymous with all sexual impropriety committed by any powerful people on earth it’s pretty hard to get a fair trial. What else could they have accused him of and just got in a conviction because of course you’re going to convict him, hes Harvey Weinstein and everyone knows he’s a creep!

    Now, am I saying that he definitely didn’t do the things that he’s accused of? I’m actually not. I don’t know, and I certainly didn’t sit through all the evidence. What I’m saying is that for justice to be blind in the same way that it needed to let the hurricane go when there was evidence he was being mistreated due to racism, it must also let Harvey Weinstein go if and only if there is evidence that he was being mistreated due to being made the centerpiece of some new global movement.

    There have been instances where Reddit detectives went out and thought that they’d solved the case, and in the end ended up convincing a website of millions of people that someone was guilty of some atrocity that they didn’t commit. So for the justice system to actually work, it has to be very careful about being fair and balanced even to the people who are guilty of something.

    I don’t think that my standpoint on this is particularly unreasonable, though it may appear so if one is emotionally charged and wants to get the bad guy.




  • To play devil’s advocate here, Lynch mobs arent justice.

    The satanic panic in the 1980s and early 1990s was a movement where kids claimed daycare workers were committing atrocities. It led to something like 170 people getting charged with crimes and some of the accused committed suicide. Once the stories hit scrutiny the problems became clear – the kids said people were killed and eaten who were still alive. They talked about secret tunnels that didn’t exist. They talked about secret ultrasonic stealth planes that could land in a neighborhood could land secretly in a neighborhood in the northwest so kids could be kidnapped and sent to Mexico, then be flown back before their parents returned. It was a movement, but it was a false movement.

    Historical Lynch mobs are a other example. Black men would be targeted by a mob for having the audacity of touching a pristine white girl (who nonetheless often fully consented and there was nothing illegal going on), and the mob would go string the guy up by the neck. It was a movement too, happened a lot, but it was just the personification of racism, and not justified by principles of justice.

    A lot of people mistake moral indignation for righteousness and as a result seem to think that if a lynch mob shows up at your door you automatically deserve its full wrath. Really goes to show humans never change, even if we think we do.


  • It’s been busy but going well. Glad springtime is finally here.

    The nature of power is such that it isn’t self-sustaining. Many people see something that has been powerful for a long time and particularly neo-marxists think power is the lens through which everything is viewed, but such a lens ignores where power comes from.

    When I say “neo-marxist”, I’m referring to the ideology that all there is must be power and we must view everything through that lens. Marxism split the world into the working class and the owners, neo-marxism split the world instead into the powerful and the powerless. Neither viewpoint is accurate enough to be a useful model of reality, even if both do touch on truth. By basing your actions on these models then, you’re going to be acting wrong because your models predict things incorrectly.

    You can get power through raw force, but it never lasts. Examples exist all throughout history. The first imperial dynasty of china was extremely legalistic, the punishment for most crimes was death. The dynasty ended when one of the generals was late for a meeting, and when faced with death anyway chose to take his men and rebel. The Assyrians used brutal repression to become a powerful player in their region, but as a result every other player in the region banded together to take them out because they were too dangerous to be left. The same for the National Socialist Germans – they used a lot of force, and as a direct result everyone else ganged up on them and tore them to pieces.

    Lasting power comes from mutual service. Even dictators who last end up having to live by this playbook. Dictators who last end up building coalitions of people within the nation because to do otherwise will just mean the next person will use slightly more force and become the next one. China as an example was a dictatorship, but the people tolerate it because many people felt the dictatorship was working in the interest of the people (more or less), and did supervise the greatest increase in the middle class in china ever.

    All of this applies to the movie industry because people think the movie industry has power solely because it has power, when in reality it had power because it was producing films and TV shows people wanted to see and were willing to pay for. As the neo-marxists have come in and changed the industry into the left-wing equivalent of making those hokey Christian movies nobody likes it has lost much of its power because a screen nobody is watching is meaningless and powerless. Meanwhile, Japan as an example has lots of great media coming out of it because they’re making stuff people like first and foremost and then if they have other goals they come with that (and they’re great capitalists, using media to sell all kinds of stuff)

    People think the problem is diversity, but the real problem is that diversity has become the centerpiece of the western media landscape, when it’s a boring centerpiece. Just being a different race or sex or sexuality isn’t interesting by itself, and all these new priorities come at the price of making unwatchable tripe.

    To give further examples, there was a lot more popular media from black people in the 1990s, and A-list actors like Wil Smith came from those backgrounds. It worked because those black people were telling stories that involved them and were about them, helping audiences learn a bit more about the world around them while being entertained. By contrast, today we have black snow white, black little mermaid, and girlboss Aladdin. It’s a meaningless display of token diversity that is disrespectful to the source material as well as to the talent who could be doing something more relevant.



  • Why would I leave it open to response? You’ve responded to 3 messages saying “enforce monogamy does not mean arranged marriages or anything of the sort” with “so what you’re saying is you agree with arranged marriages”, which only leaves 2 options – troll or idiot. And again, being a redditor who thinks every opinion that isn’t his is a troll, you’re probably being sincere and also really stupid because that’s what redditors do.





  • No, you’re just indoctrinated by bullshit and it’s making you say insane and stupid things.

    If you think that monogamy means you get to rape your partner, then you probably shouldn’t be in any relationship under any system ever because clearly consent is something you have a fuzzy concept of. You can stay in incel town where you belong.

    Monogamy is a system of relationships where you and another person agree that while you’re in a sexual relationship you won’t have sexual relationships with other people. Under such a system, if you have sexual relationships with other people while already in one relationship it’s called cheating and it’s frowned upon. You can have sexual relationships with other people, but first you need to end the relationship you’re in.

    The enforcement of monogamy isn’t forcing people into being in a relationship. It’s the enforcement of monogamy as the general way of having relationships rather than something like polygamy or a sexual free for all. Under monogamy, there’s lots of men and women who aren’t in relationships for a variety of reasons, and there’s nothing at all inherent in monogamy that suggests you must be in a relationship, any more than there being anything inherent in polygamy that suggests you must be in a relationship.

    Marriage in the west is a form of enforced monogamy. There is no law saying you can’t cheat on your husband or have a side boyfriend or girlfriend, and in fact a surprising number of marriages practice polyamory or other forms of sexual relationships but society expects that if you choose to marry someone then you’re going to be faithful to the other person. Under the European nuclear family model, there is no one ‘arranged’ to do anything – certainly not by the state. Young men go out and try to meet women, and a woman chooses who she wants to marry, and then they get married. The way that it is enforced is that you’ll face social disapproval if you cheat on your husband or wife. If your friends know that you are married, and they see your husband or wife kissing someone who isn’t you, they’ll come back to you and let you know, and if it gets out that you cheated on your spouse then you could lose social standing including losing friends because they don’t respect what you did.


  • The state isn’t the only or even the best way to enforce things. Culture and society are the things that enforce many cultural norms.

    Now maybe you might ask “why should society enforce monogamy?”, but to me the real question is, “do you hate most women and most men?”

    If we don’t enforce monogamy at a societal level, the alternative seems to quickly become powerful men acquiring massive harems, and many men never getting a chance to be in a sexual relationship of any kind. The consequence is that the women are treated like garbage because they’re just one of many in a powerful man’s harem, and many of the men go crazy and become increasingly extreme in an attempt to secure their future. We see this in some African countries where old men treat their many wives like trash and young men are ruthless and violent because they have no chance of participating in a key piece of the human experience through normal means.

    “The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.”



  • The modern world thought that material wealth and goods were the key to happiness. The postmodern world has no answers for how to be happy and even questions if happiness exists.

    To me, it seems like we’ve lost the plot. What matters is intangible – living a good life isn’t about having the most stuff, it’s about doing fulfilling things including creating things, building things, forming relationships, leaving a legacy you build over a lifetime. Taking on meaningful responsibility and making the world better in the process. Man, nothing has been making me happier than raising my son, watching him grow and change and knowing my actions have a material impact and that it does matter a lot what I choose to do.



  • You measure literacy rate as literate people per 100 people because people are literate, pieces of land tend to be unable to read or write or do math on account of being inanimate objects. More importantly, we have voter totals and literacy rates per state where nobody is measuring square meters of literacy or square meters or Republicans because that’s silly.

    Now because this discussion is just stupid, let’s be real for a minute: the major factors for literacy isn’t left vs. right on a statewide basis.

    California is relatively illiterate, just like Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Florida, and New York. They’re illiterate because people who barely speak English much less read and write it tend to end up in those places which is why new york is one of the outliers, the same way Toronto is Canada for many, New York is America for many and so they end up there as adults.

    Other illiterate states such as Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Alabama are illiterate in part because of the legacy of slavery and past racist public policy, and in part due to long-standing (but apolitical) aspects of laid back southern culture.

    Among the most literate states in the union are blue new Hampshire and Vermont, and red Alaska and Montana. Which really is the point.