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Cake day: August 30th, 2023

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  • spector@lemmy.catoCanada@lemmy.caTwo Party System
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    4 months ago

    You can fantasize about the kitchen sink of left policy all day long. None of this matters if the population is centrist neo-liberal minded. Carney is proof of this. Doug Ford is proof of this. Ford in particular is smart enough to know not to mess with social politics. That angers the broad spectrum center voters.

    Your dream NDP candidate and platform will not suddenly enamor the population. People don’t personally want to do hard things that are required to address critical issues on the economy and environment. The status quo is the path of least resistance even though the long term consequences are significant.

    The problem is not so much platform. Leftist platform is well known. By now it’s a big scary boogeyman thanks to conservative propaganda machine. The task is making such platform palatable. In other words selling it ways that people won’t be fearful that it will put them personally under hardship.

    People are short term myopic operators. The idea of a greater good for better personal outcomes does not compute. This is the fact of the matter. Why should anyone individual place big lofty but nebulous national/global issues ahead of food on the table for their family. My kids need to eat, is what anyone is thinking really.

    I know you love leftist platform. You can give the list of policy all day long. That doesn’t matter. What matters is making population not recoil at the thought of even one item on the list.

    This is why the NDP became indistinguishable from Liberals. They could not figure out how to sell leftist platform. They got gradually nudged and scared from their convictions.

    Every party is like this. They’re timid inspite of some of them being blustering strongmen. They’re all basically signalling to the the population not to worry because they won’t be the one that makes your life harder than it already is. Unfortunately for left parties the world is right minded (though not necessarily at heart). It’s the hardest to sell platform by simple metric of absolute distance. It’s not about policy itself. The challenge is making that distance to left platform less scary.









  • spector@lemmy.catoCanada@lemmy.ca*Permanently Deleted*
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    7 months ago

    I’ve been trying an experiment on r/onguardforthee. I block the belligerent reactionary accounts. You know what I’ve noticed. Not only are there repeat customers. Some of these accounts are playing both sides.

    It’s not uncommon to see a top comment presenting a popular rational take. Where some time ago I’ve blocked it because it’s a shit stirring right winger.

    They are also quite often the OP of top posts in the subreddit.



  • Ford is a Trump supporter. Republican wannabe. He’s just playing along. We’re watching WWE kayfabe.

    We’re as fucked as the Americans are. Maybe more. At least the 75 million who bothered to vote Democrat who don’t want any of this. One third of them know what’s going on. Meanwhile Ontario is still voting on pointless traditional small-c versus small-l partisan issues.

    I find myself uninvested in all this seeing how scripted it is. It’s distraction. I mean it’s been the Trump era MO for 10 years. Conservatives here love it. They’ve been cribbing notes. Why aren’t more people seeing it this way. The bluster. The table pounding. It’s all an act.

    Whatever the bigger picture ends up being in this great big geopolitical realignment. Canadians are in for very rude awakenings whenever they start realizing it isn’t anymore about nebulous partisan ideologies but fundamental shifts in the world we live in. If the notoriously boisterous Americans are asleep at their own wheel. Where does that leave us.






  • I had the realization about this distinction several years ago regarding reddit. Over the years of attrition by various controversies, reddit no longer has moderators. They’ve all left. There are moderators in name but they do not moderate.

    Many set the bots to do bot things and then fuck right off. To be fair moderating global scale messageboard is kind of an impossible task. Much less to do it for free. Can’t fault the the old school internet moderators for leaving.

    On another note. There’s no way to tiptoe around the issue of intelligence. The baseline level of discourse just isn’t capable of hard topics as it used to be. People seem to like the social drama that arises out of lack of moderation. That biases towards the lowest common denominators. It’s like a modern day Jerry Springer shock jock entertainment. But live and interactive! Social media users seem to revel in it. Bread and circuses…



  • The NPC type people. It’s like they don’t exactly have a conscious that can be spoken with.

    Some of you reading this might think I’m referring to individuals I think are dumb but it’s not that. I don’t know if it makes sense there’s a type of person that thinks they’re above others. And that it is them who are interacting with everyone else who are NPCs.

    Like, dude. Snap out of it and talk to people like a normal human being.