Canada is still awash in far-right mass media. A lot of it is coming from over the border, to boot. Until Canadians liberate themselves from the American yoke, they’re going to be force fed this trash to their detriment indefinitely.

Liberals often call Leftists excluding liberals from the Left “purity testing,”

Far more often than not, what I see is a Liberal electoralist showing up at a Leftist direct action event and saying “Please vote for my favorite guy” and getting told to fuck off. This is inevitably because their favorite guy just endorsed the “$50B for More Gaza Genocides Act of 2025” and then pissed all over the PRO Act, the GND, and student debt relief as unaffordable boondoggles that would hurt working class people.

Then the liberal calls them antisemitic Russian bots who love the Chinese Communist Party more than their own mothers, storms off, and discretely makes a call to ICE to raid their activist clubhouse. A week later, they’re online complaining about how Leftists are too divisive and hate freedom.

For Leftists, Social Democracy, or Welfare Capitalism, isn’t actually a solution.

I think there are an enormous number of Leftists who - when presented with a solid mix of social democratic reforms and civil rights protections - are happy enough to get on a progressively liberal bandwagon. What I haven’t seen is progressive liberalism at the head of the Democratic Party. Far more often than not, its the same crop of corporate goons and inter-party bureaucratic careerist worms pushing “Business First” economic policy and white nationalist social policy, regardless of who is in the White House. The only real difference is whether you get a weepy Samantha Powers or an ice-chewing Steve Bannon providing the PR for the latest wedding party bombing run or surveillance state blank check.

Show me some actual fucking Social Democracy to get behind. Show me some Welfare Capitalism that isn’t means-tested and gatekept to the point of being functionally worthless to any American within spitting distance of the poverty line. Leftists can’t be lured into the waiting arms of a plutocrat friendly Mixed Economy if all anyone offers is a bigger DHS and $20k market-interest loans to three-year-old minority owned small businesses.

Liberalism is built on a brutal system of international plunder, and is on a death spiral as liberal countries increasingly pivot more to the right. Climate Change is still an existential threat. Liberalism isn’t a solution.

Even the most successful communist states weren’t above indulging in extraction industry and sloppy emissions standards. Hell, both the USSR and the CCP were notoriously shit on environmental standards all through the 70s and 80s. It took a big internal backlash within the Chinese proletariat to get mayors, governors, and eventually national leaders to recognize the threat of environmental degradation to long term social cohesion. And Russians never got a chance to learn environmentalism, because they were Shock Doctrine’d into a Saudi style petro state.

Still debatable whether Chinese bureaucrats have come around on overseas extraction, too. Certainly, the domestic labor practices vary heavily by industry. And Chinese labor expats are as abused as anyone from the Global South.

But it does appear that these big seemingly rigid and overly-bureaucratic communist systems are receptive to some demands for reform. The ship is large and slow. The progress is gradual. Whether or not we’ll see big socialist states fully divest from fossil fuels and extend labor rights beyond their more privileged labor sectors in time to save the planet is speculative at best. But they do seem to be moving in the right direction.

Liberals seem to be collapsing back into a 19th century state of labor and ecology. Even in defiance of economic and social pressures, there is this ideological impulse towards degraded working conditions and deteriorating ecology. As someone who grew up in a deeply neoliberal neighborhood, it seems to defy the bedrock theories of liberal politics. All these pressures arrayed against it, and the so-called technocratic pragmatists are on a total dogmatic bender, intent on making the worst decisions possible in outright defiance of reason, popular opinion, and profit motive.

How can any Leftist stand behind that?

When I can get a game on my wishlist for under $20, the time cost of unpacking and patching a game is often more than the value against my bank account.

Like, sure, if they want $90 for something and I can get it for free, fuck it. Especially if its a re-release of a re-master of a 30 year old classic I already have on a console. But I’m not going to short Owlcat Games or Larian or some other high quality indie studio when its well within my budget and affords me 50-100 hours of original gameplay, easy.

0% off: I sleep

10% off: eye-crack

25% off: gentle stirring

33% off: lean up on elbow

50% off: tentatively reaching for wallet

70% off: Urgh to purchase… rising.

80% off: Real Shit

90% off: STFU, and Take My Money

It gets me every time.

It’s not a betrayal. Americans - particularly conservatives - have always held contempt for the Canadian government and its people. Trump said the quiet part out loud. But all those jokes about “America’s Hat” and “51st State” were coming from people who genuinely do not see Canada as a sovereign territory or an independent constituency.

Hopefully, Canadians are waking up to the reality that huge swaths of America view them with the same contempt more explicitly aimed at Mexicans, Cubans, Haitians, Indians and other browner neighbors and migrant workers. We’re an evil empire, and you collaborate with us at your own peril.

Feels incredibly low, considering his net worth is in the hundreds-of-billions and an easy third or more is directly tied to government contracts and other special relationships with federal and state bureaucracies.

Tesla would not have been profitable this year if not for EV credits. Starlink and SpaceX are fully bound at the hip with NASA and the Pentagon. Twitter/X is a straight-up propaganda machine, with advertisement volume heavily predicated on his proximity to the Presidency. Neurolink only exists thanks to the enormous blind spot carved out for him by the FDA (and the SEC and likely a few other agencies). OpenAI freely abused IRS non-profit rules while taking billions from Microsoft - for whom the US federal government is its biggest client and attributed to north of 15% of their gross revenue. Paypal integrates with the IRS as well as a myriad of other federal and state agencies.

$2.37B seems like the tip of an iceberg.

they have been culling via shadowbanning for a month now

Way more than months. This goes at least as far back as the 2016 kerfuffle over The_Donald, ChapoTrapHouse, and other increasingly popular outside-the-mainstream communities.

Honestly easier to trace it back to 2012, when Reddit was gaining popular steam and doing lots of high profile AMAs. Shadowbanning was a great way to quash the mix of spam accounts and hecklers without letting the people running the accounts know they needed to roll up new ones.

I just wasn’t up for reading the ~50 page report myself to find out if what they said was true.

You could Ctrl+F to find the relevant bits fairly easily.

But this demand isn’t skeptical, it is cynical. “I don’t believe you because I’m offended by your tone” is miles away from “I don’t believe you because I haven’t seen enough evidence”.

Unfortunately the article seems to have been written by someone who is very clearly biased against Israel

Can’t take anyone seriously unless they’re fair and balanced towards a genocidal military dictatorship.

I can’t take this single source’s word on it

Fortunately, they link to the original material.

Just a matter of time before conservative media finds a suitable scapegoat. They’ll get a wall of “Transgender Mexican ISIS stole the last bits of New Deal social contract” news articles for six months and come out more rabid than when they started.

This isn’t merely “Iowans are uniquely gullible”, either. The toxic nature of modern media is everywhere. And it produces as many Eric Adams Democrats as Donald Trump Republicans.

He’s on my team so I’m obligated to cheer for him.

Also I’ve shoved my head so far up right wing media’s anus that all I hear is the long slow fart of “He’s making America great again!”

Plenty of smart honest people believe hair brained bullshit entirely because their media diet has been totally captured.

Hoover was sadly trapped into an economic and political thinking that wasn’t suited for the Great Depression.

Hoover was a fascist to his bones and an egotistical maniac. He unleashed the military on strikers and labor organizers including the Bonus Army, imposed some of the most draconian immigration regulations of the era, and aided the Axis Powers in rebuilding and rearming with the help of his friends in the Bush family.

Far from trying to help, Hoover’s immediate legacy was a rapid consolidation of wealth into the hands of Republican allied industries and agricultural magnets. The vicious economic squeeze ultimately lead to a surge of unemployment and a collapse in Republican popular support, humiliating Hoover in the midst of his demand for greater private philanthropy.

But this was in pursuit of corporate oligopoly. The efforts failed because the lumpen proles could no longer tolerate their collective immiseration. Not because Hoover lacked ambition.

Buchanan was laughably incompetent, which was the style of the time for presidents before Lincoln. Buchanan didn’t respond to active rebellion because he didn’t think he could.

Buchanan cultivated a Democratic Party of insurrection and normalized the bloody suppression of abolitionists. He did respond the active rebellion. John Brown’s rebellion. And Harriet Tubman’s rebellion.

But, like the Southern secessionists who would follow him, he underestimated the passion and the sincerity of their revolutionary convictions.

The four groups used by this Nova classification system are:

• Unprocessed or minimally processed foods, which can include whole foods, fruits and vegetables, fresh meat, eggs and milk.
• Processed culinary ingredients, which can include certain condiments, oils, salts and sugars.
• Processed foods, which can include preserved and tinned fruits and vegetables, preserved meat products, breads, fresh cheese and
• Ultraprocessed foods are those that undergo industrial processing and modification using food derived substances such as fats, starches and proteins, and may include coloring, flavor enhancing chemicals and preservatives. These include chocolates, soda and energy drinks, pre-packaged meals, baked products and pastries, certain breakfast cereals, sweetened yogurts and juices.

Ultraprocessed foods — sometimes abbreviated to UPFs — are often referred to as "junk foods,"which should be consumed sparingly.

Okay, but these are largely just foods with high salt and sugar content. And high levels of salt/sugar are used for the two-fold benefit of increasing consumption and longer shelf-life.

Nothing in the article, but I’d be willing to bet the same people who eat heavily preserved foods are the ones living in food deserts and other areas that lack affordable fresh produce, adequate kitchen amenities for home cooking, and clean drinking water.

In short - poor people.

For the proprietary software, a lot of it is front-doors. Literally just pay-to-prey. Government agencies pay the big data companies to access their warehouses of scrapped data that come directly off their clients’ machines through explicit information harvesting protocols.

That said, it is technically harder to have a covert backdoor in an open source system. But it isn’t impossible, or even particularly impractical, so long as the vulnerability remains reasonably obscure. It would be naive to assume your standard array of linux oses are unassailable.

Less dumping ground and more release valve. The people Reddit is jettisoning are many of their more active and prodigious content creators and contributors. The site admins simply don’t want new human content anymore. They want passive observers who will consume advertisement content without creating drama.

Reddit simply doesn’t want an active user base. They want passive viewers ingesting AI generated content. Much better for advertising revenue that way.

I think the implication is that she is his girlfriend and he just wants to break up.

Which is a bit weird, because look at that t-shirt. She’s clearly marriage material.

Yes, that is the general answer for who gets to vote. But as I describe, that doesn’t guarantee fair.

Chattel slavery is incompatible with liberal democracy. There’s no fuzzy area to debate the point.

I’m not arguing that a restricted voter population is a good thing. I’m arguing that it’s still a democracy

For any policy authored by the enfranchised majority that impacts the disenfranchised minority, its passage and execution is categorically and indisputably undemocratic.

And the Wright Flyer was an airplane.

That stayed airborn for 12 seconds.

James Buchanan has set the bare extraordinarily high. To date, Trump still hasn’t even topped Hoover.

This isn’t in any way a defense of Trump, but modern Americans have this idea in their heads that every President in history was somewhere on spectrum of Bill Clinton and George Bush. The bitter truth is that the pre-FDR presidencies were so much fucking worse. Trump is right in line with your Andrew Johnsons and Zachary Taylors and Warren G. Hardings and Benjamin Harrisons. He is not exceptional in his awfulness. He is a reversion to the historical mean.