HonoredMule @ HonoredMule @lemmy.ca

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4 mo. ago

The way the entire Liberal party basically didn't respond to the smear campaign against them -- on top of displaying an incongruent level of confidence -- had me for quite a while wondering if they had something smart planned. And there is room for interpreting their moves as chasing one or more of these strategies:

• Run a political decoy (Trudeau) until the last minute to defuse the smear campaign
• Save all dirt on CPC until election season to blitz their support when it's most impactful
• Use a disastrous Dumpster administration to expose CPC's populist platform

But in the last quarter of 2024 the LPC spent so much time struggling precariously to run out the clock that I abandoned all of these possibilities -- or at least any of them still having a viable path.

Ultimately, Trudeau's moves worked flawlessly to massive effect, but they relied on far too much luck, some of which could not have even been predicted as a possibility. When Trudeau announced his resignation, he was completely out of time and chips, without any of the requisite win conditions in place yet. If LPC's actual plan was some subset of the result we got, then they are master gamblers (and maybe actors) with stones of stainless steel. The only way I could believe now that they had a plan along any of these lines and were remotely in control of the situation is if Singh was in on it. And if he was, that was one hell of a political sacrifice.

The bedrock of their economic calculus is a disbelief that they could ever possibly net profit by spending on other people. As I said in the last paragraph of this comment, it is their concept of society itself that is limited/constrained in scope, and that has nothing to do with money.

You're weighing the cost of fixing a problem now vs later, and they're clinging to the idea that because they're not the victims of that problem (currently nor in their own optimistic projections), it would be best to simply never solve it at all. But talking about cost to (an intentionally vague) us is generally more acceptable (and compelling) to a liberal society than its counterpart -- dehumanizing whomever currently pays it.

As long as we accept "accidental satire" as a justification. 😆

You've got to be pretty deeply indoctrinated not to think that's an order of magnitude past shady.

It has to be in the form of a question because obvious is not the same as provable in court.

Maybe you'd like to think that through a bit deeper. Canadians getting price hikes on all the stupid streaming services many won't feel they can do without even now; the operating system(s) in which they're trapped; the games they (especially younger they who don't take this seriously) buy; cloud services and apps for their zombie phones; and enterprise software systems.

I didn't say ads, I just said "virtual" and virtual content/services are a huge U.S. export. That's a lot of additional wealth that could be drained from our economy for nothing. Tariffs are pretty impractical for online transactions not tied to physical goods, but they control the credit card system and swift so they'd have a broader shot at it than us.

It's those ads in either direction that are the small fries.

That's…an interesting idea. I don't know how feasible it is, nor whether we want to be broaching taxation of virtual import/export. Open that can of worms and we have more to lose than gain. But if they open it anyway…

Ah, ok. Comedy is hard. 😄

If you read between the lines, he says too much.

Before going too far down a moralizing path, I think it's also worth pointing out that empathy is an individually developed skill, but one whose value is ultimately based on higher order reasoning and rooted in amoral pragmatism/evolutionary biology. It is not actually an ability to distinguish good from bad.

Empathy and selfishness could be considered contrasting drives, and the former is more valuable than the latter only in so far as it involves broader understanding and perspective. Both are ultimately emotional biases. Just like selfish people are liable to justify exploiting others, empathetic people are liable to justify unfair or even destructive levels of self-sacrifice.

So there's no moral distinction between being "tricked" into accidentally doing the right social thing and having empathy that helps find the same answer independently. Empathy can as easily be tricked into causing great harm through short-sightedness or failure to recognize the true cost of alleviating whatever pain is currently perceived.

For example: is adopting a large volume of war refugees the good action if it leads to public backlash that ultimately brings fascism to power and then starts a bigger war? It looks like that's a consequence we're only going to avert narrowly and by a considerable amount of luck. So far I'm still glad we did -- but boy are we cutting it close. (And to be clear I realize that for the sake of my point I'm simplifying away other factors that could have reduced the political cost and had more to do with selfishness than empathy.)

I don't know if I'd say the stakes are higher. Poilievre could win and I'd still rather be here than the states (for as long as here still isn't). 😛

For vibes, I look more to Charlie Angus. And it's probably for the best that he can reflect what's in our hearts and give us that catharsis, without being in a position to really enflame tensions. There's already a considerable difference between what I'd want to say and do and what my smarter more measured, dispassionate self would say and do. And then Carney finds a stance and tone that's close to my latter option, but I must begrudgingly admit is even better.

Actual left, true left, is when you start spending money at the cost of efficiency to further improve quality of life…

On that point, you're falling for right-wing propaganda. The extreme ends of any spectrum have some pretty asinine views held by profoundly stupid radicalized people; absolute collectivism gets just as ugly and destructive as absolute individualism. Neither represents "true" anything. Heck, even centrism has no pure form, because there is no middle, no single point that marks the right balance for all contexts.

I do agree that we have a big problem with false dichotomies and pseudo-absolutism being used to divide us. The real "them" puts great effort into minimizing and misrepresenting the values and interests that are actually widely shared. And even they would be one of us if better raised or rehabilitated away from the wealth that has captured and corrupted them into such extreme individualism.

Breaking down that assumption is step 1 to fixing things, you have to abandon the concept to fully realize that truly being actually fiscally conservative is synonymous with being pro human rights, pro abortion, pro lgbtq, pro immigration, pro science, pro education, pro healthcare.

In general sure. But you make it sound like there are never hard choices nor compromises to be made. Sometimes we genuinely cannot afford to do right by someone or something. When it comes to new problems, the frontiers of medicine and science, etc. we very often don't know what is economically efficient or even viable. But I think that's a little off topic. I don't think anyone is honestly confused by sometimes needing to spend money to save money.

Individualists love the idea of spending money to either save or make money, which is why they like starting businesses, investing, building passive income, building self-sustaining non-financial supports (a personal favorite), and any grift ready to unburden them of the means to exercise that greed to which it appeals. They just can't be up front about what it is they really don't understand: spending money on other people (without a direct personal connection). It is their concept of society itself that is limited/constrained in scope, and that has nothing to do with money.

That's still just fiscal responsibility (which also gets used as a code phrase, but that's hard to escape entirely). Given that "fiscal conservative" is an established term widely understood to represent a certain specific set of beliefs and principles, I don't know why you'd want to identify with that term based on something else that only matches the general, apolitical meaning of the label and in an incredibly generic manner that offers no real distinction from anything else.

It kind of plays right into the the doublespeak that right-leaning movements love so much -- and this is exactly why they do. It's to trick people into believing they are aligned and and then represent that alignment to others. You make them look good.

I'm going to reiterate a prediction I first made about 5 months ago, that Poilievre was going to win at least a minority but it would actually be very tight. He campaigned hard for 2 years off-season while receiving little to no journalistic scrutiny -- just propaganda from the right-wing rags. I always believed his lead would be heavily eroded when the general public started paying attention to him, rather than just his base built on grievance politics.

I never could have dared hope I'd be this wrong. But the factors I identified are still in play, and the difference largely amounts to strong circumstantial reinforcements. I.e. the new elements are the undercutting of his fake issues and Dumpster showing us what not to do so much more clearly (understandably to a wide audience) than I anticipated.

Having serious stakes really amps up how tired many of us actually are with politicians running on vibes. I don't think it's accurate to call Carney's behavior vibes when it's marked by things like answering questions and fulfilling promises. Vibes are a big part of what's getting rejected so hard with both Poilievre and to a lesser but still significant extent Singh. And it's because this time we can't afford to just play the usual "it's time for something else" whack-a-mole.

At this point I wouldn't reduce anyone's views and choices to being vibes based. Even the really bad ones are rooted in deeply held ideology and deliberate movements to radicalize people by appealing to/infiltrating those ideologies.

Perhaps you'd be so kind as to tell me what you think I'm telling you. I'm struggling to see the gotcha in making a choice while preserving skepticism.

While there may be a nicer way to say it, I'm bothered by the downvotes you're getting. Fiscal conservatism is the motivated reasoning that bridges or abstracts values and logical steps people often cannot even consciously admit to themselves.

It's like how moralizing homelessness and feelings of disgust toward them protect oneself from the fear of becoming homeless, by manufacturing a distinction.

Nobody doesn't believe in spending money wisely and sustainably.

It must be even harder pretending the CPC was ever about fiscal anything. The Overton window moves and dictates how much quiet part gets said out loud, but human nature does not change.

We're all going to have to grapple with the fact that in very unfortunate ways we are America-lite. A red wave might push social conservatism back in the closet, but we must not forget that a full 30% of us still went mask off after watching where those values lead -- twice. That's a problem that's going to require active collective leadership across Canada for the foreseeable future.

It's dangerous to like a leader as much as I like this guy. There's much in his world view that inspires ambivalence. But then every actual move is just so on point that it's hard to ignore this nagging doubt -- because it's just too good to be true.

Like what's the absolute worst thing he's done so far? In my book it was scrapping the carbon tax; it was defusing something that could cost the election, in a way that can even be easily reverted, at a time when it's about the least important short-term concern.

In my riding, the only candidate registered so far is for the CPC. 😑

Fair point. It also highlights why I consistently will use any other words than upper and lower (though I don't think I've consciously acknowledged or analyzed that before). I never really had a reaction to middle because it is largely defined in terms of relationship to those between which it sits anyway. But upper and lower carry so little information about the power dynamic as to be deliberately vague.

And while I don't think "class" as a designation of social status is really meant to imply no hierarchy of power, it certainly does downplay and obscure the underlying mechanism. I think the reason I like keeping it is that it ties the social hierarchies people recognize (and with "capital" the economic system they at least acknowledge) to the actual mechanisms giving one control over the other.