When reading headlines like this, I like to read “Ottawa” not as a placeholder for “the Canadian government,” but instead the actual municipal government of the City of Ottawa. 😆

Policy has nothing to do with politics in the historical era you live in. Accept this if you want to understand your world.

Abandon logic. Think emotion. You will not succeed when viewing politics through the lens of logic and reason. Voters no longer trust polished candidates with well-reasoned and detailed policy proposals. It’s so easy to write that crap with corporate consultants and then ignore it as soon as the polician wins.

Aside from the proud and overt racists, people don’t vote for right wing parties based on policy analysis. Maybe only 5% of the voters actually vote this way. You probably don’t vote this way. Very few voters ignore party and select candidates based on a detail analysis of their policy proposals. Most vote based on either party affiliation or vibes/emotion.

Voting for right wing populist parties is an act of rage, the political equivalent of flipping the table over. Voters have come to resent the empty promises of neoliberals, and at this point they deliberately vote for whichever crazy candidate will piss off the respectable upper crust of society the most.

Stop analyzing politics through logic, reason, and who has the objectively best policies. In the current environment, policies are seen as worthless. What matters are vibes and emotions.

When you tell someone voting for a right wing populist, “but this guy supports policies that will hurt you!” They think, “I’ve voted for the logical and right choice my entire life. I’ve voted based on policies again and again. I’ve been betrayed again and again. At this point I’m just going to vote for whoever seems to most anger the media, the corporate owned, intellectuals, and all other social elites.”

This is also why there was a lot of overlap between Trump and Mamdani voters. A fair number of voters will at this point just vote for anyone who seems to most anger the corporate media.

I will not even dignify your overt racism with a response.

AKA, the Internet matured and became corporate like every other form of media before it.

We could create forums that can only be logged on to using a desktop browser. Sure, some mobile users with basic tech savvy could install some spoofer that still let them access the site. But that’s still mission accomplished. You’re still requiring some technical competence.

Kids are smarter than this. They’ll do things like prompting the AI to write at a certain grade level or prompt it to pretend they’re a student whose first language isn’t English. Hell they can even upload an essay you actually did write and ask it to write a new essay that matches the writing style of the old one.

Thanks. Blocked and moved on.

Oh, you’re just a racist garbage person. Xenophobia does not become OK simply because the target are Americans.

Well, if I guess if I’m irredeemably evil simply because of where I happened to be born, then you have no room to complain. I’m just doing what I was born to do, apparently. I’ll disregard your words, because they’re irrelevant to an evil monster like myself.

I think they’re geeks. They’re just money geeks not tech geeks. Some people obsessively study the flaws and loopholes in technology and become hackers. Some study the flaws and loopholes of the economy and become traders and financiers. The people amassing billions don’t even care about the money. It’s just a high score for them. Finding a way to twist the market into delivering high returns through financial wizardry has a lot of parallels to hacking. I would say most of Wall Street is full of geeks. It’s just money geeks not tech geeks.

But the horse was being pulled by Greek soldiers!

So the saying should be, “beware of Greeks bearing gifts bearing Greeks.” 😂

Sure. But I think the seven year figure is how often people “on average” move, not just how often people sell and buy new homes.

Honestly it need not even be his demise. There are any number of countries he could flee to, countries without extradition treaties and willing to look the other way for any rich despot looking for a safe harbor. Some small Middle East dictatorship seems a logical choice. But even China would probably offer him refuge. Even North Korea if he’s truly desperate. Hell, if he offered to end the war tomorrow, most Western countries would probably be willing to offer Putin amnesty, as painful as that would be. If the choice is between holding Putin accountable and saving another hundred thousand innocent lives, I’ll let Putin go.

What he is truly afraid of is losing power. He can keep his life. He can keep at least a lot of his wealth. The one thing he can’t flee the country with is his power.

In the modern world, dictators never need fear their personal survival. International pariah dictators all support each other. There’s a reason Trump cozies up to despots. The dictators all realize that any of them could be deposed, and that losing power will result flight or death. They’re all paranoid and afraid of losing power and their lives. So they all backstop each other and provide what assistance they can. And what even the poorest dictator can offer is protection from extradition.

The shop keeper is just prejudiced. Charlie’s four grandparents are in a long-term polycule together. Charlie is the result of an insane two-generation long plan to get all members of the polycule to have a single genetic child together. The polycule has been completely open to the whole town about this plan, and everyone knows it.

The shopkeeper isn’t prejudiced against the poor. He just has sexual hangups. And he’s projecting his bigotry onto an innocent young child that had no choice but to be part of this whole situation.

Most people who breathe are good people. Most people running the big AI companies are not. That is the difference.

And yet ultimately that’s what every retirement and disability system of any kind has to be based on. Whether you’re talking traditional methods of just letting your old or sick relatives live with you, state-run pension systems or disability, or private retirement accounts and disability insurance, it’s all ultimately the same deal. The systems vary extremely in their effectiveness and equity. But ultimately there’s no getting around the unavoidable truth. If you want to live in a world where the elderly and disabled are simply not abandoned to die, some of the labor of the young and healthy will be siphoned off to support the old and infirm.

If you want to live in a world where you yourself will not be cast out onto the street to die when you are too old to work, then for some of your later years you will depend on the labor of others, just as you did when you were a child.

I was shocked to learn that the average homeowner in the US lives in their house for only 7 years.

I wonder how much of this is a question of what average is being used. It’s the old median vs mean problem.

Elon Musk and a hundred homeless people are in a room. By the mean, the average person in that room is a billionaire. By the median, the average person is homeless.

I’m really curious whether that 7 year average figure is based on the median or mean. Because I could see it being really skewed by young people in their twenties that move around a lot.

You can have whatever definition you want. But for me, working class means just that - a person that has earned their bread through the work of their own hands, not through the exploitation of the labor of others, through rent-seeking, or from inheritance.

I’m sure you can cite plenty of theory, but frankly, I don’t care. I prefer a definition of the term centered in lived experience. If you go off raw wealth, you just end up classifying entire nations as working class or bourgeois, at which point the term loses all meaning.

I’m not sure he’s really comparable to the typical ICE case. Obviously if you’re fighting the deportation, you’ll be in the camps for months. But my understanding is that people in there are under constant pressure to sign paperwork agreeing to a rapid deportation. They get paperwork shoved in their face in a language they can’t read and are told to sign it. ICE agents actively try and trick immigrants into signing away their rights, thus allowing their rapid deportation.

Ultimately, all this is being run by racists who want as many brown people out of the country as fast as possible. They don’t just want to keep millions of brown people in cages for the fun of it; they want to deport millions of brown people. And as long as we’re not in full “extermination camp” territory yet, achieving that goal means moving people through the system as fast as possible. Stephen Miller’s aims are advanced by brown people sitting in plane seats, not brown people sitting in cages.

I remember a story from awhile back about a court case involving an immigrant that was voluntarily seeking deportation, but was still being held by ICE. But the article treated it as a surprising oddity. It was such a notable occurrence that it was the exception that proved the rule. As far as I know, generally, if you’re willing to sign away your rights to appear in immigration court, you can get out of the system pretty quickly by opting for voluntary deportation. That’s almost certainly what Milo did.

None of this to excuse any of ICE’s crimes. But as I understand it, if detained immigrants are willing to sign away their rights to fight the deportation, they can move through the system fairly quickly. Again, it does the racists no good to prevent the people they hate from leaving.