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Cake day: August 30th, 2023

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  • You can fantasize about the kitchen sink of left policy all day long. None of this matters if the population is centrist neo-liberal minded. Carney is proof of this. Doug Ford is proof of this. Ford in particular is smart enough to know not to mess with social politics. That angers the broad spectrum center voters.

    Your dream NDP candidate and platform will not suddenly enamor the population. People don’t personally want to do hard things that are required to address critical issues on the economy and environment. The status quo is the path of least resistance even though the long term consequences are significant.

    The problem is not so much platform. Leftist platform is well known. By now it’s a big scary boogeyman thanks to conservative propaganda machine. The task is making such platform palatable. In other words selling it ways that people won’t be fearful that it will put them personally under hardship.

    People are short term myopic operators. The idea of a greater good for better personal outcomes does not compute. This is the fact of the matter. Why should anyone individual place big lofty but nebulous national/global issues ahead of food on the table for their family. My kids need to eat, is what anyone is thinking really.

    I know you love leftist platform. You can give the list of policy all day long. That doesn’t matter. What matters is making population not recoil at the thought of even one item on the list.

    This is why the NDP became indistinguishable from Liberals. They could not figure out how to sell leftist platform. They got gradually nudged and scared from their convictions.

    Every party is like this. They’re timid inspite of some of them being blustering strongmen. They’re all basically signalling to the the population not to worry because they won’t be the one that makes your life harder than it already is. Unfortunately for left parties the world is right minded (though not necessarily at heart). It’s the hardest to sell platform by simple metric of absolute distance. It’s not about policy itself. The challenge is making that distance to left platform less scary.




  • spector@lemmy.catoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldGood job
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    2 months ago

    Yeah it was a close election. We absolutely did not reject Trump with any consensus. There’s not as much to celebrate people think.

    What people don’t know is the Conservatives here have had a revolving door of leaders in search of a Trump-like candidate. The past several election cycles have been this way. The party has sold their soul to MAGA style politics a long time ago.

    They just had the best showing ever in this election even though it was a loss. And this is with the best Trump wannabe candidate they’ve managed to field thus far. A belligerent authoritarian-like tyrant with zero shame. They are not going to stop this any more than the Republicans would to turn back from Trump. They may even keep the current guy even though he lost his own seat.

    Canada will inevitably elect a conservative government. It’s a defacto two party system. It will all go to hell. Especially if MAGA is still ruling America at the same time.





  • It’s not exactly accurate either. It’s not that Trudeau is “poison to the liberal brand”. American politics poisoned our politics. It’s true we vote out parties but this time the real shit is because of the poison pill of insane American politics.

    Back in 2011 the “liberal brand” was that of being relegated to the 3rd place party because they lost the election so bad. Trudeau was plucked out to be party leader. Some say reluctantly because they had no one else to lead it. We will never know the true behind closed doors story.

    The liberal brand or whatever was dog shit 20 years ago. Conservatives won the smallest minority government ever. Nobody wanted to vote for liberals. Nobody wanted to vote for conservatives. So the conservatives got about 10 years of government because of apathy.

    Trudeau was actually doing fine in roughly the first half of his leadership. Rescued them no longer being one half of the defacto two party system. Economy was doing good. Poverty was going down. Restored the census which conservatives killed off. Removed conservative censorship of scientists. Actual climate change policies. Got legal weed. Actually addressed social issues. Unlike the previous conservative government who were stoking proto-MAGA type divisiveness.

    Then the Trump era came into full swing and the conservative party adopted American culture wars. Then COVID and the economic+social fallout hit. So naturally all that is Trudeaus fault.

    Whoever is the unfortunate next leader of the liberal party will also be “poison” to the liberal brand. Because that’s how Americanized culture war politics works. They will ad hominem the next person to death. Elections will have absolutely zero policy and 100% culture war personal attacks.

    In another reality where America doesn’t go off the deep end Trudeau maybe even has few more years in office until getting voted out in a boring uneventful election where conservatives win another small minority. But no this is the insane timeline. Conservatives are headed to a resounding majority win because “MAGA” reasons.





  • I had the realization about this distinction several years ago regarding reddit. Over the years of attrition by various controversies, reddit no longer has moderators. They’ve all left. There are moderators in name but they do not moderate.

    Many set the mod bots to do bot things and then fuck right off. To be fair moderating global scale messageboard is kind of an impossible task. Much less to do it for free. Can’t fault the the old school internet moderators for leaving.

    On another note. There’s no way to tiptoe around the issue of intelligence. The baseline level of discourse just isn’t capable of hard topics as it used to be. People seem to like the social drama that arises out of lack of moderation. That biases towards the lowest common denominators. It’s like a modern day Jerry Springer shock jock entertainment. But live and interactive! Social media users seem to revel in it. Bread and circuses…






  • When dental care started being covered here suddenly my parents had a bunch of urgent issues. The guy is bit of a diva too. He absolutely will not acknowledge the patients at all who not scheduled for procedure with him. Not even a “hi” or anything. Dentists are a weird bunch.