It’s “linguistic repositioning” at its finest.

I’m sure Modi will be delighted to join a coalition against authoritarianism. India would make a pretty tenuous ally – to put it mildly.

I was waiting for some context like this before forming an opinion. Thank you for surfacing it.

The article seems to be rather incomplete. Just off the top of my head I notice the absence of anything regarding foreign affairs at all, let alone tariffs, and no mention of sales tax, national defense, food safety and supply management…

Presumably, it’s pruned to focus on the things people confuse. But these days that’s likely to include foreign affairs and trade. I don’t think premiers are normally anywhere near as involved in that as currently, and I don’t have a solid understanding of provincial authority there myself.

Earning condemnation from Campaign Life Coalition is an extremely low bar. Case in point: even Poilievre cleared it. I don’t know what could possibly warrant even mentioning the opinion of a gossamer-masked hate group.

https://archive.is/OZbom

There’s a generalization being made here that’s only supported by one anecdote. But as anecdotes go, holy hell and fuck that guy. One could have no regard for the most basic human decency and he should still be deposed for abject incompetence as a negotiator/salesperson.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Ford said some overtly divisive stuff in his zeal for mining developments. But behavior like Rivet’s cannot be laid at Ford’s feet. That’s the behavior of a man who made a choice long, long ago about what kind of person he’d be.

Strongly agree. It’s a service that federal or provincial governments could maintain for all (lower) levels of government, crown corps, etc. where account creation is restricted to those entities and prominent public figures within them. And just like that you have a secure, reliable, and accessible general purpose communications platform where every post is from a verified identity with clearly specified qualifications.

A conservative woman is still a conservative, so…

I think the problem is partly that at least a couple generations have been taught about exactly one genocide: the holocaust. So to them anything short of the holocaust isn’t genocide, because they simply have no grasp of the general concept beyond systematic mass-murder of epic proportions. These people grew up with the UN Genocide Convention – arguably the most authoritative definition and certainly the most influential one – and have probably never even read or heard Article II (the definition).

But it certainly doesn’t get much more explicit than:

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

The other part is just refusing to recognize crimes committed against a group you don’t like or want, if doing so might negatively affect you. I shake my head when people complain about leftist discussion getting bogged down on definitions. These things matter, which is exactly why the right treats words like a game based on deception and subversion. Caring about definitions is just a communication fundamental necessary so we can actually have the same conversation. But individualistic philosophies don’t even need that; they need wedges for grievance politics and maximally-flexible boundaries.

The big question in my mind is why are dictionaries adopting modern slang and responding to other drift in linguistic meaning while still maintaining super-narrow and otherwise vague definitions of genocide?

I entertained similar interpretation for a bit as well. But after a while, the absence of any attempt to control the narrative while clearly losing public support was at best tone deaf (if there wasn’t some trick up their sleeve).

After watching Singh act like he’s got a clear shot at forming government while his ratings are tanking and legitimate criticisms basically went unanswered, the possibility that they’re just oblivious started looking all too plausible. It seems like every party’s leadership can only see other parties’ faults and weaknesses.

That said, doing nothing wasn’t the worst strategy. Responding with explanations of why things are actually good and/or getting better in Democrat style would have been way worse.

Misinformation you say? Funny thing is, Gunn’s words can only be explicit denialism, or proof that Gunn doesn’t know what genocide is – making him the one who needs to “go read a book.”

Now would be a very good time to plea stupid.

Oh he has a solid plan for that. Just shut out any reporter who’ll ask that question.

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.

As long as we accept “accidental satire” as a justification. 😆

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…

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

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