johnfabian
1yr ago
I mean the very first thing that came up on google when I searched for a representative article was a WSJ op-ed with the the sub-headline "Don’t believe this week’s denials. Progressive Democrats really are coming for your kitchen appliances."
At least among Canadian conservatives the response was similar. For example from the Toronto Sun: Just the gas stove? No, green zealots want your furnace, hot water tank, too
I'm not a partisan in this debate. I think it would be good if gas stoves get eased out in the near future (more important in areas with high renewable energy production), but there are valid practical, aesthetic, and survival reasons for having a gas stove.
johnfabian
1yr ago
johnfabian
1yr ago
Update to the education workers strike
Last week I wrote about how the Ontario government was voiding Charter rights in order to impose a contract on the union for education workers (basically, the employees in schools who aren't teachers or admin). They went on strike on Friday, there were protests over the weekend, there seemed to be a crescendo as both sides started to entrench, with other unions from Ontario and Québec announcing plans to strike or protest in solidarity, and rumours there would be a call for a general strike and then... thunderous anticlimax. The government of Ontario announced at 10 AM today that the legislature would rescind the bill and return to negotiations if the strike ended. The union appeared surprised at this (they had their own press conference scheduled right after to call for an escalation in strike actions, but had to delay it), and a few short hours later announced that schools would reopen tomorrow. The union says it reserves the right to strike (because now doing so would be legal; the actions up to now were illegal because of the use of the notwithstanding clause) but with tensions ratcheting down I'm betting on no more drama.
Basically this looks like capitulation from the province. They spent a lot of political capital on bringing out the Big Stick and then surrendered rather than smack someone with it. Maybe there will be further twists to come but it looks like they had an expectation of a much more muted public response. The Ford government relies very heavily on public opinion polling to mediate their decision making (all throughout the pandemic they were some of the worst offenders of trying to make policy via the latest poll) and apparently polling showed most Ontarians blamed them for the strike.]
Anyways I'm obviously tentatively happy about this. The atmosphere among the crowds in Queen's Park today was pretty jubilant. I really hope this is a shot in the arm for labour because it's been a long few decades without any meaningful wins in Canada.
johnfabian
6d ago
Trump is an obese 77/78 year old. It makes sense to have a backup you'd be happy with regardless.
johnfabian
2mo ago
I've been binging Only Connect, a game show people here might enjoy very much. The appeal of it is that it's a sort of hybrid of trivia and lateral thinking, which often forces contestants to combine different sorts of thought processes to find answers. It's delightful in that it is simultaneously unpretentious in its presentation and incredibly pretentious in its subject matter, is played for no money, and as far as I know in the English-language world it is the most difficult game show. If nothing else it will improve your knowledge of British geography. The (almost) full archives of it are on youtube allowing you a near-infinite back catalogue. If you want a taste here is the most recent series finale.
johnfabian
6mo ago
This is outside the bounds of the hypothetical. Dwight Eisenhower is not relinquishing command of the Allied Expeditionary Force to you, nor are you personally replacing the Allied heads of state as chief coordinators of war strategy. The only role you have is to advise Eisenhower to what degree French civilian casualties are acceptable.
johnfabian
1yr ago
tl;dr: there is no “greenhouse effect” in reality (nor “greenhouse gases” either).
The greenhouse effect is so trivially shown experimentally that it's a fairly standard activity for 6th grade kids to do.
I'm wondering where you got this rather interesting sequence of thoughts from. There are a whole bunch of various obvious errors that jump out - for example you seem to be confused as to what is actually warming, as you seem to think the Earth itself is a single system (like when you say no substance can raise the temperature of its heat source).
johnfabian
1yr ago
Jokes can "ruin the tone" in real life, why wouldn't they be able to in a film script?
johnfabian
1yr ago
Im guessing cast iron type pans are banned on induction stoves. Because they don’t work on electric either as I’ve learned and ruined the glass surface before and had to replace it.
I'm confused as to why cast iron wouldn't work on electric. I use cast iron for maybe >80% of my cooking (either my skillet or Dutch oven) and I've had no problems.
Cast iron is presumably perfect for induction because of how ferrous it is, but I've not had the chance to try it myself.
johnfabian
1yr ago
current efforts to fight climate change are causing more harm than good. (75%)
Could you expand on this? Curious as to what exactly you mean by this
johnfabian
1yr ago
I would echo @MathiasTRex's advice in never engaging in these kinds of discussion online. But I would also say that I think you misread the situation. People were upset after a mass shooting (hate crime?). They were venting and perhaps trying to solicit some sympathy/attention. Wading in with the "well, actually" doesn't really help anybody even if you are, indisputably, 100% correct. This is the kind of situation where more social intelligence and less rational intelligence helps.
I only offer this advice because I myself walk blindly into these snares all the time, and have to try really hard to bite my tongue and not impose Rational Logic™ on people's feelings
johnfabian
18d ago
Absolutely not. Don't even bother thinking about it again. They were out to scam you and you just got them first.
johnfabian
3mo ago
Jokes are not a problem, pranks aren't a problem and you even noted yourself that the misogyny and homophobia is light hearted, which in a sane world would be another way of saying "not a problem". And then we get the kicker - repressed homoeroticism. No action involved is an issue, but there are problematic thoughts involved.
Yeah I don't think a lot of it is a problem. I'm not one to start an Inquisition over some "problematic" jokes or whatever. But when you're say, having all the veterans take turns pissing on cookies that you then force the rookies to eat, or you have all the veterans take turns teabagging the rookies, or you force the rookies to run a gauntlet of towel-whipping while nude... there's a point where this crosses a line into both homoeroticism and cruelty
johnfabian
3mo ago
Man, if only they had somehow tracked the guy who wrote those Wannsee minutes down. Maybe interrogated him, or had a big trial or something. What an incredibly insightful process that would have been. Shame it didn't happen.
Your hate is too obvious, it makes the shtick too visible. You need to apply a few more layers of lacquer or something. I don't get the point of it all either, it's too effortful to be merely the product of some kind of stubborn contrarianism. I know you're lying, you know you're lying, you know I know you're lying, what's the point?
johnfabian
4mo ago
I think it was likely that political pressures in Israel meant that a primarily non-violent response would not have been acceptable. Yes, Israel could have used the rush of international sympathy as diplomatic capital, but Israelis want a lot of Palestinians to die for this, and would vote for whoever promised that.
johnfabian
5mo ago
This is the only possible outcome. Getting rid of DEI is an impossibility. Nobody with their hands on the levers of power actually wants to do it. All that will actually happen is Jews will get re-ranked inside DEI orthodoxy, or a parallel Jewish patron bureaucracy will be set up. And they will continue to collaborate throwing white people under the bus for literally everything.
Somebody writing for the Wall Street Journal did a bit of polling, and the results were amusingly predictable.
Only 47% of respondents could identify which river and which sea "from the river to the sea" meant. When shown the region on a map and realizing what the slogan would mean, 75% of respondents who had previously supported the slogan moderated their opinion.
johnfabian
5mo ago
This is not really a cynical take, it is what our officials out-and-out say: the purpose for immigration is cheap labour and keeping up housing prices.
Building new cities does not work towards those goals. Shoving 500k new people every year into the GTA does.
johnfabian
6mo ago
I think you know that's a rather markedly atypical use of the word "liquidate". I'm inclined to think you are trying to be deliberately inflammatory, and (poorly) pretending otherwise.
"Ah you see officer, when I said on twitter that Hamas should liquidate all the Jews I simply meant that they should be provided with refreshing beverages!"
johnfabian
6mo ago
I read The Left Hand of Darkness earlier this year and was sort of surprised to see the amount of reading into it of exploration of trans topics. To me the novel did not really address what I could recognize as transgender/sexual themes. Rather Le Guin seemed much more interested in exploring masculinity/femininity as social constructs, and how a culture might be affected without "true" masculinity/femininity. Besides the toying with the reader of seeing the characters as male by default, the introspection seemed mostly to focus on what the cultures lacked in their essence by not being sexually dimorphic. E.g., Karhide is a society that simultaneously lacks female affection and childrearing, but also male obsession and capacity for war.
Maybe I have a sort of inherent bias against reading things as trans metaphors, but some of the reflections I read afterwards trying to tie the novel to contemporary trans politics seemed like rather clear misreads of the novel to me. Just my impression
It's pretty wild to imagine how different history may have been if that vote had swung another half percent in the other direction.
The result would not have been Québec leaving Canada, but there probably would have been a marked increase in French/English antagonization, as well as presumably French/indigenous strife. The 1995 referendum question was much too vague; while the PQ fully intended that a 50+1 Yes vote would allow them to proceed with a negotiated or unilateral secession, how it would have played out in reality is doubtful. Subsequently the Supreme Court adjudged that provinces do have the right to secede, but it requires "a clear question and a clear answer" (neither of which the 1995 vote had), and that would oblige the federal government to negotiate an exit for whichever party was seceding.
But one could certainly imagine a lot more social strife and culture war if the vote totals had been reversed. For reference here is the referendum question:
Do you agree that Quebec should become sovereign, after having made a formal offer to Canada for a new economic and political partnership, within the scope of the bill respecting the future of Quebec and of the agreement signed on June 12, 1995?
I imagine that for many it was very much less than clear what this entailed. This was of course, by design.
johnfabian
7mo ago
Would that really be necessary? There's millions of Ukrainians who already lived within Russia's pre-2014 borders, and unless I'm very much mistaken I've not heard of much repression or resistance from them.
johnfabian
7mo ago
I think this will be bad for Bibi. It's one thing to have occasional rockets slip through the Iron Dome and kill a civilian or two per year. It's another thing to have this happen on his watch. The legitimacy of Likud is that their hardline approach delivers results with respect to the security of Israel. When the dust settles opinion might turn on him; I think this might happen regardless of whether there will be a general political shift.
I think the decision to slowroll settler expansion in the West Bank in exchange for petty violence from Palestinians was a very deliberate one, but this level of violence will probably force some kind of shift in Israeli strategy, one way or the other.
johnfabian
11mo ago
Several of the ones I wanted to read appear to have been immediately deleted by their authors.
johnfabian
1yr ago
I went down to Florida a week ago to golf some. I was on the putting green before a round and overheard some boomers talking about the different guns they owned, and the conversation eventually shifted to the new Florida gun laws that allow permit-less CC (think someone joked "do you have a holster attachment on your bag?"). They were all dumbfounded as to why anyone would want someone with no firearms training to have guns on them in public, and couldn't understand the possible motives for passing such a bill.
The next day driving north I saw a random with a gun for the first time in my life on the interstate; two motorcyclists on a windy day (so their shirts were flapping up) with holsters on over their sweatpants (and no helmets).
Did Germany "struggle" killing 6 million Jews? I think people may not be aware of how condensed the timeline of the Holocaust actually was. Part of this I think is reflective of "survivor's history", which I talked about before here: the people who survived the Holocaust and disproportionately shaped western perceptions of it were by necessity aberrations from the norm. They were mostly western Jews whose march to the death camps began after the large majority of Jews were already dead.
The vast majority of victims of the Holocaust were eastern European Jews, whose mass extermination was conducted in a fairly narrow timeframe (with the notable exception of Hungarian Jews). The Holocaust as can be coherently defined started on June 22, 1941 with the invasion of the Soviet Union. Within six months of that mark, somewhere around a million Jews were dead - the victims of bullets, nationalist militias, POW camps, forced starvation, and experimental mobile gassing vans. In January 1942 Nazi bureaucrats assembled to plan the Final Solution, and by the end of that year roughly another 3 million Jews had died, mostly asphyxiated by carbon monoxide. This brings us to roughly two-thirds of the final total within a span of 18 months. The purpose-built extermination camps built for Operation Reinhard operated for another half a year or so until they were sabotaged or dismantled, and by that time most of the remainder had been killed. The remaining Jews still to die at this point were mostly westerners or Hungarians who would mostly be poisoned by hydrogen cyanide at Auschwitz.
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