At this point, it’s just virtue (vice?) signalling.

To be a good member of the right-wing-nutjob club, you have to know all the shibboleths: anti-climate change, vaccine denialism, performative bigtory, anti-urban, performative environmental abuses, transphobia, etc. Tribalism is fundamental to human psychology, and–despite people bitching about purity tests on the left–the right has been purity-testing it’s members, purging non-conformers and othering enemies for a while.

Poillevre knows he must go all-in, lest he be replaced by someone with even less shame.

This and Marathon were why I almost didn’t make it into University.

We’ve been using “bribe developers” to fill the gap since we stopped building public housing almost fifty years ago. It’s never worked, and it isn’t going to start now

Maybe, and hear me out, here, maybe governments should just build homes directly instead of bribing developers to do it?

The market has no interest in solutions whent there’s very good money to be made on the problem.

Yes, but they get there “backwards”.

It’s not like they believe healthcare is inherently demotivating, it’s that they’re already Red Team members, and “Healthcare and welfare breed moochers” is a Red Team belief, and since they’re good Red Team members, they synthesize it into their belief system–despite the fact functionally no one rips off the healthcare system because, frankly, you have to have some kind of pathology to visit a doctor enough for fraud to be an issue.

I mean “Oh noes, they’re ripping off the healthcare systems by… (checks notes) …getting antibiotics for their earache!!” is not a thing. Ever.

Everyone, even in countries with socialized medicine, avoids interactions with the healthcare system until they need to. I mean, do you you really want to recreationally get your throat swabbed? I’m sure there’s four people on this planet of nine billion who get off on that, but that’s it.

Now, rich people, they come to this believe authentically. They hate public healthcare because a) they have to pay for it, and b) it’s one less piece of leverage they have to keep people shackled to work. But make no mistake, they also suffer from the delusion, above.

Yup

Voted 99-0 in the Senate.

Good job, Democrats. We know Republicans were pieces of shit, but the reason Democrats’ polling is in the toilet is because of stuff like this.

IRC, XMPP, Usenet.

We need open options that aren’t beholden to a given company. Email is the last vestige of a more civilized age.

Y’know, I used to agree on this, but in the era of deepfakes I half wonder if we’d have body-double Trumps leading the country for the next several decades. Like a stupider version of the “Putin Body Double” theory.

It’s not like there isn’t days and days worth of video and audio to train the AI on.

So, if we catch a rich guy using drugs, they go to jail, right?

The NDP keeps making the same mistake: they try to be “serious” and “centrist” and get flanked by the Liberals every fucking time because, if you want a socially liberal but economically centrist party, the Liberals already fucking exist.

The NDP has been ducking the “socialist” label since Ontario’s Rae government fell because they’re big scared of being called socialists. Which is hysterical because the conservatives will call anyone left Mussolini “socialist!” because, in right-wing circles, words don’t have meaning.

They’re refusing to fight the class war, and as a result they’ve ceded the working class to the fucking Conservatives. Which is insane.

Charlie Angus is about the only NDP member making a lot of noise about this, and he’s retiring. The NDP should be a populist party, but they’re afraid to be

This. A thousand times this.

The same implosion in young, urban support happened in the US for the Democrats, and for the same reason: millenials and zoomers are tired of being sucked dry for the comfort of Boomer and elder-X’ers housing-based retirement fund.

Want to fix this? Forgive student debt and actually put shovels in the ground for housing (not “accelerator funds”, not tax breaks, not low-interest loans to developers: fucking buy equipment, pay people, and build shit)

Most other premiers aren’t held bankrupt by UCP crazies who’ll force a leadership review if they don’t toe the fascist line.

Smith, on the other hand, owes her whole career to appeasing right-wing nutjobs.

He’s an opportunistic jackass, but he’s not wrong.

Well shit, I really liked Book Depot, or at least their physical space in St. Catharines.

I’m less sad it’s gone now.

You’d think this, but so far he just seems to keep damaging more things and rolling everything up into a kind of metastasizing grift that gets it’s tentacles into everything.

Discretion? From the whale carcass anti-vax guy?