I get it. Especially Southern Ontario. You've already got new york, why would you want more New York?
You think most of Canada would fight back against the Americans at this point?
Make a good offer, you can have a new US state tomorrow in Alberta.
Make a good offer, you can have a new US state tomorrow in Alberta.
You don't seem to remember a whole lot about the pandemic. People who weren't getting vaccinated were being referred to in the same way that you might talk about an insect infestation or rodents. The rhetoric was downright genocidal. Our prime minister asked whether we should continue to "tolerate these people" and ominously ask whether we should allow them to continue to "take up space". We were talking about a head tax for those people in some areas. In australia, they were literally being rounded up and sent to concentration camps. In the meantime, the government lockdowns were being entirely blamed on the unvaccinated, even in places where most people were vaccinated. (Of course, the establishment media in the pocket of government will tell you that yes the camps exist, and yes they're there to concentrate people who are more likely to get covid, but they're totally not covid concentration camps)
Go figure, clinical trials run by companies that stood to make billions of dollars ended up finding exactly what those companies wanted to find. If you'd like, I can dig up all of the studies sponsored by cigarette companies that say that cigarettes don't cause cancer.
By the way, let's not forget here that the entire process was streamlined via Trump's Operation Warpspeed. They didn't run the same testing as they would on any other vaccine, that's why they were able to get it done in less than a year rather than the 10 years it normally takes to have a vaccine approved. It takes 9 months to make a baby. It does not matter how many women you put on the job, or how many men you put on the job, it takes 9 months to make a baby. It doesn't matter how much money you put into the process, it takes 9 months to make a baby. Similarly, it takes a long-term to complete long-term studies. The other thing that you need is the freedom to speak truth. If you wanted to end your career in medicine, a really good way it would be opposing the official narrative on covid. The massive corruption in medical science was on full display for all to see.
That moving of the goal posts that you're supporting here is required because of the expedited schedule and reduced testing. There were no long-term tests, so they didn't know how long protection was going to last, they didn't know what the long-term effects could be. "Just get two doses of the vaccine and covid will be beaten" has now turned into "get a shot every 3 months"
I keep on bringing up stuff that actually happened, and you keep on saying that you don't remember it. How about this 2020 article that said the vaccine is 95% effective? One of many.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/18/coronavirus-pfizer-vaccine-is-95percent-effective-plans-to-submit-to-fda-in-days.html
I'm afraid that given the authoritarian measures taken, you can't separate what you remember from the political. Not when all of the news organizations and all of the social media companies were directly being dictated policy by the government. That's the cost of authoritarianism. You want to control everything, you get all the credit and all the blame.
Go figure, clinical trials run by companies that stood to make billions of dollars ended up finding exactly what those companies wanted to find. If you'd like, I can dig up all of the studies sponsored by cigarette companies that say that cigarettes don't cause cancer.
By the way, let's not forget here that the entire process was streamlined via Trump's Operation Warpspeed. They didn't run the same testing as they would on any other vaccine, that's why they were able to get it done in less than a year rather than the 10 years it normally takes to have a vaccine approved. It takes 9 months to make a baby. It does not matter how many women you put on the job, or how many men you put on the job, it takes 9 months to make a baby. It doesn't matter how much money you put into the process, it takes 9 months to make a baby. Similarly, it takes a long-term to complete long-term studies. The other thing that you need is the freedom to speak truth. If you wanted to end your career in medicine, a really good way it would be opposing the official narrative on covid. The massive corruption in medical science was on full display for all to see.
That moving of the goal posts that you're supporting here is required because of the expedited schedule and reduced testing. There were no long-term tests, so they didn't know how long protection was going to last, they didn't know what the long-term effects could be. "Just get two doses of the vaccine and covid will be beaten" has now turned into "get a shot every 3 months"
I keep on bringing up stuff that actually happened, and you keep on saying that you don't remember it. How about this 2020 article that said the vaccine is 95% effective? One of many.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/18/coronavirus-pfizer-vaccine-is-95percent-effective-plans-to-submit-to-fda-in-days.html
I'm afraid that given the authoritarian measures taken, you can't separate what you remember from the political. Not when all of the news organizations and all of the social media companies were directly being dictated policy by the government. That's the cost of authoritarianism. You want to control everything, you get all the credit and all the blame.
Ironic that the same authoritarianism that China has been trying to export to the rest of the world eventually harmed China.
Authoritarianism is a lottery ticket you purchase by giving up both kidneys. If you win then you'll be fine, you'll get new ones. If you lose, there's really nothing to do but die.
Authoritarianism is a lottery ticket you purchase by giving up both kidneys. If you win then you'll be fine, you'll get new ones. If you lose, there's really nothing to do but die.
Unfortunately, as the Internet becomes more mainstream, its ability to function as a system outside of other systems will continue to be reduced.
Funny how internet access is a human right right up until someone isn't using the internet to support megacorps.
Funny how internet access is a human right right up until someone isn't using the internet to support megacorps.
Reminds me of a lot of people saying "We're not in a recession"
...
For a lot of people, there's never not been a recession. The numbers keep going up, but if you're not in the 0.01% that doesn't matter.
...
For a lot of people, there's never not been a recession. The numbers keep going up, but if you're not in the 0.01% that doesn't matter.
No other vaccine used the same technology, so of course there were more risks. Instead of using tried and true vaccine technologies, the drug companies took the opportunity to use this new technology for the first time ever. Most vaccines operate by presenting the body with either weakened viruses or parts of a virus that has been destroyed. By contrast, mRNA vaccines operate by having your own body assemble pieces of the virus, then your immune system attacks those cells with the foreign proteins that the vaccine induced them to create. It should be self-evident that there are different risks involved between introducing a weakened or dead virus into the body and having the body manufacture pieces of a virus and attack itself.
When I took the vaccine, I did so fully aware of the fact that there were different risks, but at the time governments around the world worked with communications providers to suppress information about those risks. When I got covid later, huh it turns out that despite their claims of 90% protection pretty much everyone who got the shot also got covid!
The politicians around the world violated people's basic human rights by shutting down any speech that didn't follow exactly what they wanted said. Anyone who believes in liberal values who lived through the pandemic came out the other side with their faith in virtually every institution destroyed. And you will never make me forget that people's ability to pay for food, to pay their mortgage, to support their families was taken away by my government for having the gall to demand policies that the same government ended up implementing a mere eight months later. All the while people like me were called racist sexist misogynistic transphobic homophobic American Russian bots, again, for demanding policies that the exact same government would implement eight months later.
I will never forget that. I will never forget that my donation to a charitable cause I believed in was reversed twice under the pressure of government under no law. I will never forget that politicians who opposed the status quo were arrested.
My grandfather fought in world war II to oppose tyranny, and those same countries that he fought for around the world spit on his grave. If you ever want to know if the Holocaust could happen today, we just proved that it can at any time.
When I took the vaccine, I did so fully aware of the fact that there were different risks, but at the time governments around the world worked with communications providers to suppress information about those risks. When I got covid later, huh it turns out that despite their claims of 90% protection pretty much everyone who got the shot also got covid!
The politicians around the world violated people's basic human rights by shutting down any speech that didn't follow exactly what they wanted said. Anyone who believes in liberal values who lived through the pandemic came out the other side with their faith in virtually every institution destroyed. And you will never make me forget that people's ability to pay for food, to pay their mortgage, to support their families was taken away by my government for having the gall to demand policies that the same government ended up implementing a mere eight months later. All the while people like me were called racist sexist misogynistic transphobic homophobic American Russian bots, again, for demanding policies that the exact same government would implement eight months later.
I will never forget that. I will never forget that my donation to a charitable cause I believed in was reversed twice under the pressure of government under no law. I will never forget that politicians who opposed the status quo were arrested.
My grandfather fought in world war II to oppose tyranny, and those same countries that he fought for around the world spit on his grave. If you ever want to know if the Holocaust could happen today, we just proved that it can at any time.
Problem is they based authoritarian policy on the premise that the vaccine would stop covid and end covid. They treated people with legitimate concerns about taking a barely tested experimental drug like supervillains who were singularly responsible for continuing horrible authoritarian control of individuals lives, that if only that last 15% would lie back and think of England it'd all be over.
I wasn't opposed to the rapid development of the vaccine or making it widely available. Lying continuously about it's effects and risks was evil, as was the policy actions they took.
I wasn't opposed to the rapid development of the vaccine or making it widely available. Lying continuously about it's effects and risks was evil, as was the policy actions they took.
The most frustrating thing is that they did this along with all their drinking buddies around the world. It's like all their friends jumped off a bridge then they go "if you say I'm wet because I jumped off a bridge, why are my friends all wet too?" You lemmings all jumped off the bridge at the same time, that's why!
It does make sense if you're going to take it all four values to call it a 2 dimensional continuum with change / left wing on one side, tradition/ right-wing on the other side, authoritarianism as the one side of the other axis, and liberalism as the other side of that axis.
That's where you can have conservative liberalism, and conservative authoritarianism, or you can have progressive liberalism, and progressive authoritarianism.
I'd be the first to admit that the words are a little bit broken at this point, because just because something is new does not mean it is progress. Some of the moral calculus that is new and different over the last few years has a striking resemblance to religious forms of slavery that were outlawed in Ghana in the late 90s. Similarly, take a look at the rhetoric out of chairman xi in china, and even though it's a left-wing authoritarian regime it sounds intensely conservative: "we really got to get back to the communism, we need to go back to the way things used to be"
That's where you can have conservative liberalism, and conservative authoritarianism, or you can have progressive liberalism, and progressive authoritarianism.
I'd be the first to admit that the words are a little bit broken at this point, because just because something is new does not mean it is progress. Some of the moral calculus that is new and different over the last few years has a striking resemblance to religious forms of slavery that were outlawed in Ghana in the late 90s. Similarly, take a look at the rhetoric out of chairman xi in china, and even though it's a left-wing authoritarian regime it sounds intensely conservative: "we really got to get back to the communism, we need to go back to the way things used to be"
I just realized that he was referring to people who crack games.
In which case he's probably right.
In which case he's probably right.
"trans women are women and deserve all the same rights as women" is a phrase that sounds really pretty in the abstract dealing with perfect platonic forms, but gets real complicated when rubber meets road and you actually have policies that apply to real people.
Is bicycle with an electric motor a motor vehicle? In a world of platonic forms, you could perhaps say that an electric bike is a motor vehicle and should have all the same rights as a car or motorcycle. But then you get into the nitty-gritty of actually doing something like that, and things start to get very hairy very fast. Bike riders aren't licensed, they don't have to go through any particular training or testing, bicycles can't go as fast as a car, they don't typically have a headlight, they don't typically have signal lamps, they almost universally aren't insured, and so on.
So what this means is that in practice, while you can make an argument that a bicycle with an electric motor is a motor vehicle, and it's reasonable to give access to some streets in a limited manner, you can't say that a bicycle with a motor has the same attributes as a car or motorcycle, doesn't have the same powers, doesn't have the same responsibilities, and thus can't have fully equal rights.
And that goes both ways too. In my analogy, you will be in huge trouble if you drive your car down a sidewalk, or down a walking trail, or drive on the road without a license or without insurance. So you can't argue that because a bicycle with an electric motor is a motor vehicle that the car gets equal rights with the bicycle.
That doesn't mean that you ban bicycles, that doesn't mean that you unreasonably restrict bicycles, it doesn't mean that you unreasonably restrict cars or motorcycles. It does mean that a bicycle with an electric motor isn't a car.
Even if you can bully someone into saying it is, merely redrawing the map does not change the territory. You can draw 1000 lakes on a map of a desert, that does not mean the real world will morph into what you have drawn. Regardless of what the postmodernists would like to think, the real world is the final arbiter of truth, not human beings. Real world actions driven by convincing others to do things in the real world can of course change the world, if you convince a bunch of people to head out and dig a bunch of irrigation channels then a desert can be changed into arable farmland, but no amount of pure rhetoric and convincing others will
by itself change a desert into a wetland.
Is bicycle with an electric motor a motor vehicle? In a world of platonic forms, you could perhaps say that an electric bike is a motor vehicle and should have all the same rights as a car or motorcycle. But then you get into the nitty-gritty of actually doing something like that, and things start to get very hairy very fast. Bike riders aren't licensed, they don't have to go through any particular training or testing, bicycles can't go as fast as a car, they don't typically have a headlight, they don't typically have signal lamps, they almost universally aren't insured, and so on.
So what this means is that in practice, while you can make an argument that a bicycle with an electric motor is a motor vehicle, and it's reasonable to give access to some streets in a limited manner, you can't say that a bicycle with a motor has the same attributes as a car or motorcycle, doesn't have the same powers, doesn't have the same responsibilities, and thus can't have fully equal rights.
And that goes both ways too. In my analogy, you will be in huge trouble if you drive your car down a sidewalk, or down a walking trail, or drive on the road without a license or without insurance. So you can't argue that because a bicycle with an electric motor is a motor vehicle that the car gets equal rights with the bicycle.
That doesn't mean that you ban bicycles, that doesn't mean that you unreasonably restrict bicycles, it doesn't mean that you unreasonably restrict cars or motorcycles. It does mean that a bicycle with an electric motor isn't a car.
Even if you can bully someone into saying it is, merely redrawing the map does not change the territory. You can draw 1000 lakes on a map of a desert, that does not mean the real world will morph into what you have drawn. Regardless of what the postmodernists would like to think, the real world is the final arbiter of truth, not human beings. Real world actions driven by convincing others to do things in the real world can of course change the world, if you convince a bunch of people to head out and dig a bunch of irrigation channels then a desert can be changed into arable farmland, but no amount of pure rhetoric and convincing others will
by itself change a desert into a wetland.
It's been 10 years since Windows 8 dropped, and as far as I can tell you still can't correctly set an IP address from the settings app in Windows 11 so you need to use the windows 7 era components.
Windows is a Frankenstein's monster where you've got the way that works to do things, then you've got the post windows 8 way of doing things. Both have to continue existing because Microsoft isn't capable of handling basic tasks so people need to use the old ways of doing things.
Think about the comparable upgrades that occurred over the same time spans in the past. The switch from 3.x to 9x, from 9x to NT, from basic NT to 2000 and XP. Not just that, but the switch from Mac OS 7.1 to Mac OS 8, to mac OS 9, to Mac OS X! That year, the Linux Kernel was one year old, and essentially the entire Linux ecosystem went from being one shitty kernel to being kernel version 2.5 and from no distributions to speak of to having something as user friendly as mandrake.
In a lot of ways, it seems to corroborate the stories we've all heard that these companies which used to be filled with strong programmers are now filled with people who are basically like the Europeans in the dark ages squatting in the ruins of Greek and Roman buildings that wouldn't be possible to build again for centuries.
Evil is one thing, incompetent is another, powerful evil and incompetent is the worst of all possible worlds.
Windows is a Frankenstein's monster where you've got the way that works to do things, then you've got the post windows 8 way of doing things. Both have to continue existing because Microsoft isn't capable of handling basic tasks so people need to use the old ways of doing things.
Think about the comparable upgrades that occurred over the same time spans in the past. The switch from 3.x to 9x, from 9x to NT, from basic NT to 2000 and XP. Not just that, but the switch from Mac OS 7.1 to Mac OS 8, to mac OS 9, to Mac OS X! That year, the Linux Kernel was one year old, and essentially the entire Linux ecosystem went from being one shitty kernel to being kernel version 2.5 and from no distributions to speak of to having something as user friendly as mandrake.
In a lot of ways, it seems to corroborate the stories we've all heard that these companies which used to be filled with strong programmers are now filled with people who are basically like the Europeans in the dark ages squatting in the ruins of Greek and Roman buildings that wouldn't be possible to build again for centuries.
Evil is one thing, incompetent is another, powerful evil and incompetent is the worst of all possible worlds.
https://youtu.be/z65AVGrobWE
Context: Hastings is a street in Vancouver filled with drug addicts. It's gross.
Context: Hastings is a street in Vancouver filled with drug addicts. It's gross.
One reason why the people's party of Canada did so well in the last election. (Not great, but 8%, which was better than the green party which has has decades to grow and approached the bloc Quebecois who are a solid #4)
People don't want leftists who call themselves conservative. They want conservatives who call themselves conservative.
There haven't been any free marketeers forever. Free markets don't have government debt as over 100% of GDP.
People don't want leftists who call themselves conservative. They want conservatives who call themselves conservative.
There haven't been any free marketeers forever. Free markets don't have government debt as over 100% of GDP.
There's a line somewhere between "based" and "megalomaniacal supervillain". I sort of feel like this is getting close to the line, might be well over it.