The problem is that the LPC has little or no bench strength. Freeland was probably the best option and she's been Hillary'ed by the CPC and the right-wing media over the last four years. After her, the bench is very thin: O'Reagan's similarly tained, Carney is a corporate tool, Leblanc isn't far behind. It gets pretty thin after that. I think they're looking at another Dion/Ignatieff-style wasteland as they try to figure out how to find a leader who's cool and popular without worrying about them doing anything.
The NDP has it worse. They really should have kept Mulcair or selected Angus. They'd be in a much better place now, if they had, though even then the media would just try hard not to cover them, like they're doing with Stiles in Ontario, who is very good but doesn't get any airplay.
“Liberal” doesn’t mean what many people think it means.
It doesn’t mean “leftist” or “progressive” or “humane”. There might be some overlap, but these are not the same things, despite conservatives trying to define them as such.
You really should read Karl Popper's Paradox of Tolerance to understand why this is important, and why "the only way to counter speech is with more speech" isn't just wrong, it's actually counterproductive.
I was a young sysadmin during this era, I don't know if I agree with this sentiment. It got tolerable by the time of the last service pack, but it was a security nightmare otherwise and didn't offer much over Win2k.
That said, I'm not a Windows fan in general, but I'd class the following as the "good" ones:
NT 3.5 (user-mode GDI FTW!)
Phone 7.0 (this was probably what I'd call the Practically Perfect version of Windows. WP7 is just so good)
NT 3.1 gets an honourable mention
8 (after WP7, this is the first version of Windows that was pretty much stable on day one. Say what you will about the UI, the core was the best Microsoft has ever one; ditto fir Server 2012)
10 (8 but with refinement; I'm cautious putting it here because you can see the genesis of the decisions that gave us 11)
Vista (a lot of what people like about 7 really came from Vista, like the WDDM driver model and the improved security infrastructure; Vista, like NT, came out before hardware was commonly available that could run it)
Anchoring the bottom
98 & ME (IE integrated everywhere and the security nightmare it begat deserves a special place in hell)
1.0 (you had to be there, but this thing made Atari TOS look sophisticated)
95 pre-OSR2 (VxDs, DLLs and a login screen you could bypass with an escape key!)
NT4 (it wasn't bad, per se, but I still resent how unstable it was versus 3.5)
CE and pre-5.0 Mobile (hey, guess what, replacing your battery wipes your device because we didn't implement persistent storage!)
11 (10 without most of the redeeming features, plus an Android launcher for a Start menu. Now with extra spyware!)
A lot of people really like 7 and 2000, but I tend to think of those as polish releases of Vista and NT4. They're Microsoft eventually fixing their mistakes, after having everyone drag on them for years.
I hate to say this, but you're probably living in a bit of a bubble. I know I was.
A lot of men, across all age ranges, tend to lean fascist. There's a lot of reasons for this, but the core problem is that progressive neoliberalism does a terrible job speaking to cis-het male anxieties, while fascism welcomes them with open arms.
It's all bullshit, of course, but at least they're being heard.
Progressive politicians really need to let the 1990s go. Third-way triangulation worked great then, but it's ineffective now.
The old adage is "you don't have a labour shortage, you have a wage shortage", and it's true here. If we had a labour shortage, companies could pay more and/or train people, but that would be expensive. Better to just strip-mine south Asians for every cent they're worth.
I would point you to a recent Lemmy post that shows grocery and processor profits spiking, while farm income is flat.
Cancelling the TFW program would help, sure, but the other half of the coin should be much, much higher marginal tax rates that put a brake on profiteering. One of the reason everything is so theadbare is because the rich are taking an increasing share of the wealth, and the reason they're doing that is because we don't tax them for it. Because we don't tax them, they have no incentive to invest in people or productivity improvements, and every incentive to use those profits for financialization.
Which she'll probably do, but not during the lead-up to the election.
The knives will be out for Netanyahu, especially if the Democrats win the house and keep the Senate. He's been a huge liability for them, and there will be a lot of pressure from people who write cheques to Israel to get him out in favour of someone who isn't an embarassment.
Expect Netanyahu to go begging to Putin if Harris wins.
Ontario is likely to re-elect Ford, and Ford's desperate to squeak an election in before the feds do. Ontario almost always elects a separate party provincially and federally, Ford knows Poillevre is a liability for him, and Poillevre know the reverse is true. The difference is that Ford can call an election whenever he wants, while Poillevre has no such influence.
US politics influences Canada, and Harris' popularity is taking the shine off the protofascist right-wing. Poillevre's seen his largest decline in polling ever last month.
This is a "strike while the iron is hot", and Singh would need to be colossally stupid to fall for it.
All of her politics are about signalling that she's a good member of the tribe, and aligning those tribal boundaries with the interests of her donors. So we get a mix of Great Value Fascism with oil industry pandering as a result.
To paraphrase Terry Pratchett, once you think the problem is that you have the wrong kind of people, you shouldn't be a leader