The title of this post reminds me of that terrible joke about an old person going to the doctor. They complain about having gas, but say that it’s manageable because the farts are silent and neutral smelling. Doc prescribes some pills. A few days later the patient comes back complaining that the pills have made the problem worse, because now the farts are super smelly. Doc responds “Great, the pills have helped your sense of smell, the next set will try to help your hearing”.

Even before the current shitshow, it was common for Americans to put Canadian flags on their luggage to try and avoid negativity while travelling in other countries. Like they literally dropped nuclear bombs on Japan, and are acting all shocked pikachu that Japan don’t like em all that much?

America’s recent approach to trade is significantly tarnishing their reputation in the business sense, in that you can’t even trust America to stand by American principles anymore. But I mean, other aspects of their self-image were just imaginary to begin with.

Political leaders / rich people are goose-stepping around in public, rich people are having private jet fuck parties in Venice as they burn the ecosystem to the ground, “climate leaders” like Suzuki are living high-polluting lifestyles, “climate celebs” like DiCaprio are equally depraved and two-faced, “popular” celebs like the Kardashians and Taylor are well known for taking incredibly wasteful luxury private jet trips. They all likely generate more pollution in a week than I will in my entire lifetime, and the public praises these sorts from all sides of the spectrum.

I vote green (in Canada), doesn’t matter. I end up with an NDP government provincially (left leaning party), doesn’t matter. No political party is willing to take drastic steps on this front. Even these nation building projects Carney’s on about here in Canada, are just him suppressing Canadians’ rights so that US companies can exfiltrate resources like Oil - and he was the more ‘progressive’ pick compared to the other potential leading party.

Like I said, I ain’t gonna be ashamed of bein lazy in my recycling. My personal climate footprint is tinier than most, and far smaller than those people. Even if I get that plastic straw it’s still nothing compared to any of them.

Least I’m not stupid enough to think that I’d motivate someone on the internet by insulting them. So I must have at least one wrinkle in there somewhere ;p

Yes, kids would potentially be a motivator. We can see how well they motivate those tech ceos to focus on climate change issues, with their tech fascist eugenics-like breeding programs producing numerous spawn. That telegram dude with like 100 kids must be the most Eco-conscious guy on the planet.

Because I have zero motivation to do so at this point.

You do you. For my part, honestly, even going over board on recycling is off the table. I’ll separate bottles and stuff, but spending excessive time doing stuff like collecting grease to put in compost bins feels pointless and meaningless – why would I put myself out, spend a buncha time doing that kinda stuff, while rich people are buying up Venice to have a Private Jet orgy, and a ton of media hypes it up as though it’s awesome / they have no fall out from it? I have more respect for my own mental health than to internalise the guilt of it all, when every rich person out there is happily burning everything to the ground, and the majority of the poors are cheering them on for doing it.

Like I said in another post, even “Climate leaders” like David Suzuki owns like 4-5 houses, and jets between them for shits and giggles. It’s all a joke, you may as well not punish yourself over it if you can’t be fucked to do some of the small shit.

Yea, I’m not in favour of crypto banks in any way shape or form. Over the past five years, almost every crypto coin has been blatantly used at some point for large scale fraud, and direct bribes – Trump’s a great case in point there. Even more, shifting monetary control into a crypto-verse, is overtly giving all authority and power to tech bros, who are proving in very overt fashion that they cannot be trusted these days.

Just look at SVB. Thiel and his buddies looked at SVB’s balance sheet, said “We have so much money in this bank, if we all pulled out at once we could kill the bank and trigger a regulatory fiasco” … followed by Palmer Luckey, one of that crowd, putting forward a Crypto-first bank with his billionaire buddies backing. So the guys that caused the latest banking collapses, are wanting us to trust them to handle all the monetary stuff. Crypto being beyond government control is a nonstarter, and as soon as govt is involved is basically the same as regular currencies. But even worse the main proponents of it are completely untrustworthy, and are entirely hell bent on dismantling things like democracy. They want the power to mint their own “zuck bucks” to function as official currencies in their little tech fascist fiefdoms. So fuck that noise.

Yeah, cruise lines opening back up and returning to business as usual after COVID, basically made me stop paying attention to a lot of this individual-targeted climate change stuff. That was a perfect and fairly natural way to end that high pollution luxury oriented industry, but everyone basically said “boomers still like cruising, so fuck the planet”.

If boomers and rich people can continue to pollute at incredible rates, just give me my stupid plastic straw back. At least that way I can drink a full mlikshake before my straw turns into paper mache, while I watch the world burn.

Yeah – agreed. I tried watching “The Magicians” because it was highly recommended. No CIS white male characters in the show really. They had a white bisexual guy who spent a lot of time sleeping with gay dudes. Wasn’t much of an issue / commented on for the first few seasons, and it was ‘ok’ viewing, if sorta stupid. But then in season 3 and 4 they were super heavy handed in breaking the fourth wall and saying cis white guys who identified with just that one bisexual white guy character were being racist/sexist for not looking at other characters, in part because that character gets killed off in season 4.

Why they thought that their cis white guy audience was going to identify with a bi-sexual neuro-divergent sort, one who’d spent like an entire (time loopy) life time with his gay lover, I’m not sure. But the heavy handed 4th wall breaking to talk-down to that audience demographic did end up making me not bother with seasons 5.

… Honestly, this isn’t too surprising with how saturated the media is with minority groups. Almost every show I see on various streaming products ends up having heavy LGBTQ+ plots rammed in, trans characters showin up, always a multicultural combo of characters and fewer and fewer generic CIS white people. When the media is constantly blasting you with minorities and minority issues, in a highly biased way, it’s totally not surprising at all that people would start thinking they’re a way bigger slice of the population.

Like someone once pointed out that there were more airplane pilots in North America than trans people. So imagine if every TV show you watched, suddenly had an airplane pilot show up and talk about airplanes a bunch, had whole episodes dedicated to his occupational trauma, regardless of what the main plot of the show may be. That would be more representative of the general public, than having trans people in every fucking show going on about trans trauma.

You’ll never see Canada block big tech at this point I’m afraid. All the talk of sovereignty is just that, talk. None of our different government agencies is prepared to abandon Microsoft. All of our financial regulators are completely in bed with Microsoft. Most of our banks are in bed with Microsoft. Our ATMs run on Windows due to Payments Canada being in bed with Microsoft and mandating it. All of your banking data is accessible by Microsoft. Every government agency runs on Microsoft.

Every time there’s an announcement about ditching US providers, ask your MP/MLA if that includes Microsoft / big tech. There’s always an “out” in those announcements to allow them to dodge that one – like “It’s too expensive to change”, or “too difficult to change quickly” or whatever.

I mean, look at all these “nation-building” projects that they’re itching to suppress Canadian’s rights to “get moving” – they’re all projects that’re gonna be lead by Big US companies to extract resources from Canada. They put on a good show, but the reality is that Trump / America was right that Canada is basically a little bitch at this point. Our politicians have proven that time and again this year.

I think the most bizarre thing about this story, is that it’s not ‘new’ to hear that traffic cams / automation can catch a ton of people speeding. Like I recall them setting these systems up in various cities two decades ago, and the number of people caught in the early stages of the programs was huge then too. It’s “normal” for people to drive ~10mph over the speed limit, though that varies based on things like school zones (where you dont go over at all). It’s also normal for drivers to align to the speed of surrounding traffic flows. The public pushback that resulted, killed many of the initiatives. Cams were still installed, but many cities that used them tended to have restrictive conditions. This isn’t ‘new’ tech by any stretch, nor is it a ‘new’ idea to be tried.

The article hints that they’re allowing a 10mph wiggle room this time, but the main thing that’s changed, is the public has been beaten into submission by authoritarians – it’s unlikely there’ll be any civil action against it.

If you believe there were mass graves in a similar vein as you see in Israel, Nazi Germany, or other similar genocides, you haven’t looked into it all that much. There was no mass execution of First Nations. They had a higher rate of death among children as a demographic over a roughly 150 year period during the operation of the Residential schools. There were children that died while at residential schools – some who were buried in unmarked graves and/or buried in places their next of kin didn’t know. Even the headlines that get posted generally highlights that they’re “unmarked” graves, not “mass” graves in recognition of this fact. This was mostly during the earlier parts of that time line, where things like “phones” were less common (so you couldn’t call their parents), the older generation couldn’t read/write (so a letter to notify parents may’ve been sent but would be less effective), and moving a corpse across the country to a small remote community was incredibly expensive. The times journalists try to sensationalize it and claim it as a ‘mass grave’, they’re generally referring to an area with multiple unmarked graves, where the children were laid to rest by the church (individually) – basically a big graveyard without headstones, that formed over the 100+ year period, as the church buried kids incrementally one by one over that period.

But the Church was never rounding up and executing children by the hundreds in a planned approach to snuff out the lives of an entire people. The root of the ‘genocide’ is/was that the Church and Canada was (arguably) intentionally and systematically using the residential school system to convert FN into more western ways of thinking and cultures (“killing” the culture, not the people – sorta more like how Russia abducted a bunch of Ukrainian kids, and is systematically indoctrinating them into Russia). That, coupled with an aggregate statistic over a century, is what’s used to call Canada genocidal and lump the country in with what’s going on in Israel currently.

No western country is likely to step up at this point, in my view at least. The conservative leaning folks are going hard into authoritarian xenophobic trends, and the left leaning folks consider anything that alters the existing culture of an area to be genocide.

The latter is really kinda tragically hilarious, cause we see countries like Canada declaring themselves genocidal and shaming their non-indigenous population as though they’re monsters, while simultaneously defending Israel’s actions in regards to Gaza. There’s even talk of making it a crime to question how horribly genocidal Canadians are, and also to make it a crime to say anything bad about Israel. If we see a religion-backed school, we’re to think “genocide! You’re attempting to subvert the student’s cultural religion and norms under the guise of teaching people to read and write! Their traditional culture doesn’t have reading or writing, you’re genociding their oral traditions too!!”; and when we see a mass grave filled with civilians, we’re to think “Totally justified, those bulldozers are just defending themselves against the toddler / journalist / civilian corpses, and mass graves are just practical! No moral issues or crimes here! Definitely not a genocide”. These things were brought forward by our left-leaning government parties. Not sure if those’ve passed yet, but they’ve definitely been on the table.

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Strange semi related old person story – back in highschool, one of our teachers had the class write essays on whether nationalism was good or bad. We were then given an option to either present our papers, or do a debate exercise with a kind of round robin pro or con. So you’d partner with 1 other person, debate if it was good or bad, then groups of 4 doing the same, until it was the whole class. In my paper and in my discussions, I had used a similar approach as this comic – basically just establishing what nationalism was vs patriotism, and drawing nazi’s in as an example too. No one in those discussions contested that Nazi’s were nationalists – but they still argued in favour of it.

By the end, I was the only person who thought nationalism was overall ‘bad’. The tide had turned in the groups of 8 stage. Because a hot girl had declared her support for nationalism. That’s all it took for people to like/excuse nazis, even back in the early 2000s. An excuse.

If people paid attention to his history, yeah, they’d see it. What Carney did at the Bank of Canada and his various comments there are pretty telling.

The 2008 financial crisis, we avoided the worst of it because Carney and them were ‘slower’ to roll out the same dangerous lending practices that we saw down south, but they were still going forward with them – we just had less exposure at the time the US popped, so they were able to quietly prop up the big banks (and just the big banks, they let the smaller ones figure it out themselves) using the CMHC. Canada’s small FIs, Credit Unions and such, got through it without a scratch, because they weren’t in to risky convoluted mortgage block trading, and had various safeguards in place already like a shared liquidity pool. Carney’s reaction to Canada doing so well in 2008, was to demand that the industry align more with the international standards which had allowed for those issues to occur. Things like the shared liquidity pool were dismantled as a result. Fast forward, and Thiel and his buddies pop SVB – and suddenly regulators are making noise like “Maybe banks and FIs should have some kind of shared liquidity pool for this sort of issue!”. Carney’s comments at various events also displayed a blatant lack of understanding for the smaller financial industry players in Canada – likening Canada’s credit unions to spain’s private banks (which were run by oligarch-ish families, with zero underwriting due diligence).

The guy trusted the international community hierarchy / structure, more than the Canadian system. He trusted that hierarchy even after it had failed, while the Canadian approach had more success. He forced Canada’s FI’s to align with worse-practices, just because it aligned to international norms. He is not pro-Canada, nor is he pro-small business.

He’s still likely better than PP would’ve been.

In this case, it makes sense though. The recent techbro crypto bank announcement, a bank created by the same tech billionaires that intentionally crashed/destroyed SVB, is basically a play to shift the American financial system into stablecoins / cryptocurrencies entirely, as it’s something that the tech bro class figures they can control for their own benefit.

That’s all moving ahead on schedule, and is in line with Curtis Yarvin’s whole techno fascist monarchy dream for how democracies need to die. They really only need to appease Trump for so long as it takes to get control of those purse strings. Egging on destruction / chaos for things like social services also feeds this pattern, it’s easier to convince someone they need to make drastic changes to their home, if that home is currently on fire.

Having a constant tech-fascist publicly whispering these sorts of things in Trump’s senile ears helps to keep up the facade within the maga-bubble that it’s a “broadly accepted” approach to benefit everyone, that’s been agreed upon by a bunch of “data driven” science types, when it’s absolutely not. It’s tech oligarchs looking to dismantle and own most western democracies.

It’s hilarious in a way that Thiel, one of the billionaires who triggered a liquidity crisis that sunk SVB, is off proposing to fill the gap that he created. It’s also entirely fitting with the conspiracy theory of the tech bro fascists wanting complete autonomy to setup electronic fiefdoms.

I don’t really get how this would work though, in more practical terms – as a lot of the crypto stuff is just antithetical to the banking industry. Like even the whole schpiel the crypto bros often go on about how you can send money quick from wallet to wallet, with the old “OMG we did it! How can banks be so stupid and slow!”. It’s largely due to regulation. Like anti-money laundering regulation, where countries don’t want citizens funding things like foreign terrorist groups with untrackable/unblockable wallet to wallet money transfers, so they tell banks they gotta scrutinize every transaction quite a bit, under threat of hefty fines – and where the govt can overtly tell banks to block payments to unfriendly countries (eg. Iran).

Meh, it’s clear they won’t care about the fundamentals at all, nor do they care to understand how the industry works. They’ll likely use the bank to undercut existing players, while propping it up by manipulating the stock / piling in their billions. The regulation comment is a misdirect, alot like claims of wanting to be regulated were a misdirect back with FTX – these guys are far more likely to aggressively lobby for / pay the republicans to dismantle regulations in their favour, changing the landscape to their personal benefit. After the competition starts crumbling / they start moving towards a monopoly, they’ll either turn it into a regular bank in terms of service (but under their control of course), or they’ll intentionally tank it to gobble up whatever reserve/insurance funds exist, shifting that wealth into the billionaire’s pockets too, and leaving people with few options other than “under the mattress” for their savings. That’d make people almost entirely dependant on maintaining a regular working income, completing the tech bro fascist wet dream of having indentured slaves that can’t push back against any of their bullshit.

Bill C-5 is a lot of nodding and ‘trust me’ type arguments that get made by a liberal party that’s designed the legislation to be ‘reviewed’ after 5 years, meaning its highly likely that it’ll get used by another party - which could happen quite quickly even, given the minority govt status. Also, for its nation building projects clauses, ask yourself whose rights/interests are getting suppressed, and which nation owns the businesses that will be building those projects. It’s generally American owned / head quartered companies, getting assurances that the pesky locals rights won’t get in the way, from our own government. It is quite explicitly selling us out to foreign business interests.

Like even the reactors that Ontario (in partnership with a couple other provinces, I think) is building, are American made from GE and rely on Uranium that we ship down to the USA, they then enrich it and ship it back to us to power those plants. Or the Avro Arrow that Ford trumpets all the time, which was always a concept car / “platform” to sell component contracts to foreign companies. They put cheaper EV’s for everyone in Canada on hold, because Ford wanted to try and appease American car dealers. They’re aggressively pushing things like OpenBanking, even though practically every Canadian financial institution is outsourcing that functionality outside the country (even most “local” CUs now have their websites hosted by an Indian company) – some even “disclose” all their member information to India/US-based AI companies, because I guess there’s a low risk of it being regulated by the Carney govt: he’s very bullish on trusting big tech to be country agnostic, despite countless examples to the contrary. Suppressing privacy rights would be an easy way to green light large government AI integration, particularly with foreign company involvement/control. These things are not nation building, nor are pipelines owned by US interests. But those are the sorts of ‘projects’ that this kind of legislation will most likely target.