It’s pretty simple really. How about foreign countries don’t let unvaxxed people in. Not for vacations, not for business, not for anything. U.S. wants to be morons, let them be morons inside their own borders.

True. I must have typed my comment during my daily 5 seconds of optimism before crashing back down to my usual cynical reality.

Or…hear me out here…maybe we could try holding men accountable for their actions? I’m just spit-balling here, but it’s so crazy it just might work.

Would you care to cite some specific examples that you didn’t just repeat off of your uncle’s Facebook wall?

I don’t necessarily disagree. But I don’t exactly consider Latintimes as mainstream news. They have a decided lean to the left and are publishing a story that points to something they want to say. No different than when a conservative right leaning website with a name like “Patriot Page”, or “Freedom Force” or some other creepy MAGA bullshit name does the same thing.

There are main stream outlets, and then there are outlets that we can all tell, mostly from their content, don’t bother to hide their bent left or right.

This isn’t like CNN or CBS or BBC are broadcasting it. (Cue somebody linking to exactly that…making me look like an idiot.) Heck, AFAIK, even Fox News and MSNBC, the two “main stream media” sources that I would consider least biased in both directions, aren’t touching it as a story.

And why they seem to selectively think sexism is bad while denying women education

That’s not what they’re saying. They’re mocking American hypocrisy.

I’m thinking of dropping social media for the next six months because there’s a lot of shit going on that I have no control over and I can’t change.

That was pretty much my exact thought. I still log in (obviously). But I used to doom-watch the news after work leading up to the election. And for the last couple of nights I’ve been watching reruns of Quantum Leap on Pluto TV instead.

Feels good.

Because it’s only “alleged”.

Imagine if you’ve been alleged to be a pedo. It’s not proven. There’s not enough evidence. And it’s very possible that you’re not a pedo. But then someone “leaks” that allegation to your neigbours…how would you feel.

If there’s proof, absolutely release the names. If it’s just “alleged”, don’t fuck up a stranger’s life for nothing.

less internal European cooperation and a further move toward sovereign nation states

I call dibs on being assassinated in Kosovo this time around.

I live in Saskatchewan and I was just talking to a “right wing” friend of mine about this very issue. I had gone on a diatribe about right-wing conservatives in the US and she was getting a little upset thinking I was upset with her as a “Canadian right-winger”. So I pointed out to her that she isn’t actually “right-wing”. In fact very few people in Canada except for some nut-jobs who want to bring Trumpism to Canada are right-wing as the U.S. would describe it.

Our typical right-winger, including some very good friends of mine, are conservative, but not anti-abortion, hand-maid’s tale, anti-immigrant conservatives. Our right-wing would be considered liberal to the United States and the only reason most people here think they have to defend Trump is because they nominally share the adjective of “conservative” even though they’re VASTLY different levels of right-wing.

They’re innundated with American news 24-7 and don’t make any distinction between what they believe and what MAGA believes, but when you ask them specificially what they believe in, it’s far far far closer to an American’s concept of liberalism than of MAGA.

Best case scenario…yes. But likely…not very.

The only thing that the bankers and CEOs that keep the Liberal coffer’s full, and the Oil & Gas Companies (and now Russia apparently) that keep the Cons coffer’s full, is a mutual hatred for the working man and for unions.

It would take a herculean effort, and a charismatic leader that we haven’t seen since Layton, to bring the NDP into Official Opposition range, let alone leading it all.

I agree that that would be the best possible version of Canada. But greed will never allow it to happen.

Yeah. Best case scenario I’ve felt would be that Trudeau resigns, the liberals bring in someone more popular that will effectively block Pierre Poppinfresh and hold onto a minority government.

Keeping PP from power isn’t quite as imperative as Trump down south, but it’s close. He’s more Ron DeSantis than Trump.

In my experience there’s never been any such thing as the “silent majority”. It’s just something desperately unpopular public figures cling to to convince themselves they (or their policies) are popular.

Eight decades later, and all those lessons have been forgotten. Self-interested and shortsighted leaders have risen to the tops of many nations, and nationalistic rhetoric is gaining popularity again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss–Howe_generational_theory

In some ways, I’m a believer in the “80 year cycle, theory”. But to me, it’s a much simpler cause. 80 years is going to be roughly four generations removed from whatever the last chaos was (in this case, Hitler and Fascism and the Holocaust).

The generation that lived through it is long dead. They taught their children (My parents) to never forget. They in turn taught their children (Me…Gex X) to still remember what was fought for. And then the current generation (my kids if I had any) have a far less fundamental grasp on that history. We’re so far removed from that event that it’s been forgotten just long enough that it all makes an appearance again for the very same reasons. Because it’s an easy trap to fall into; blaming someone else for your problems.

All this has happened before and it will happen again. It’s as simple as “those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it”.

I generally never last very long in a playthrough of The Long Dark

JT just needs to announce who’s on the list and I’m willing to bet we’ll see why exactly PP doesn’t want a background check done on him.

Pierre Poppinfresh’s name is likely top of that list.

Blue lightning as Sam Beckett leaps away to the next problem he has to fix.

Fair enough. But despite any possible repercussions, the play was to make the NDP a much bigger player than it had ever been, and he succeeded; under him, the NDP became the official opposition for the first time in it’s history. If Layton were still around, and the NDP perhaps managed to retain the official opposition status, Canadian politics would have been forever changed. Instead we quickly reverted back to the Liberal/Conservative swap game every few election cycles.

I think regardless of the ultimate legacy of Layton, the status quo would have been shaken up. And at this point, any change is better than two entrenched and old political parties essentially power sharing every few years.

I always thought it was the terrible campaign quip that sunk him… I don’t remember exactly but it was something like:

“Healthcare, Medicare, Mulcair…” and IIRC it received a LOT of groans at the time.

Mulcair also could never ever ever live up to the legacy of Jack Layton. If Jack hadn’t been taken from us, we’d be looking at a very different Canada right now.