johnfabian
1d ago
Hypotenuse, harmony, harpy, hiccup.
Why are you spelling hiccough wrong?
johnfabian
1d ago
You could write the same thing from a left-wing perspective. It used to be that many democratic countries - even western ones - had substantially socialist economies, with the state an active agent in the economy, public ownership or stewardship of many sectors and major companies, and public-sector unions and employees being the dominant representatives of a powerful and organized labour movement.
Now, thanks to international organizations and agreements, it is impossible to actually have a left-wing government. Want to nationalize a strategically important firm? Want the government to manage a crucial economic sector? Think a natural monopoly should be serviced by a state-owned company rather than private equity?
Sorry, you signed economic treaty #142495 with the international Fuck You Organization. That's actually illegal. There will be a fifteen-year court case in some international court run by countries that hate you, and in the meantime the bond market has decided you're actually a major lending risk. Look, I'm sure you'd love to manage your own country's economy, but the rest of us have decided that it's not really in our interests for you to do so, so please give control over to our team of experts so they can carve you up and take it all for themselves.
Now there is actually a thesis that ties everything here together: countries across the world have seen their legislatures abandon exercising their power, and ceded instead. To the executive, to the courts, to unelected institutions, to foreign organizations, etc. There's nothing stopping them from retaking that power, except that they don't particularly want to do their job, and the vagaries of culture and ideology in a globalized world have stopped them from working together effectively.
johnfabian
2d ago
So far this is looking like an absolute massacre.
johnfabian
3d ago
Nobody can tell me, without googling, who won the midterm elections in 1862, or 1942, or whatever. I've read a lot of histories of the Civil War and I never hear anybody say, "everything changed after the November results". It's all about generals and battles and war.
As far as I can remember every Civil War history I've read has mentioned Democratic gains in 1862 and Copperhead/McLellan concerns leading up to the 1864 elections. The political ramifications of the 1864 campaigns on the presidency were certainly well understood by Lincoln and other top generals.
johnfabian
7d ago
No matter how high you are setting the bar for what you consider "racist", I can assure you the Israeli right-wing is clearing it with ease.
johnfabian
10d ago
I think there's a general principle that exists that the more impactful (I searched for a better term and could not come up with it) the thing that is being planned is, the greater risk of the conspiracy falling apart: what keeps a conspiracy together is a unity of purpose and goals. The greater the material impact upon the world, both (in general) the larger number of people you need to recruit, and the more difficult it is to align the preferences of all those involved.
I think it is probably much easier to keep a group of people silent about making a new video game or car than it is to say, conduct a terrorist attack or false flag.
I think this is also due to the nature of a conspiracy to do a legal act versus an illegal act. For one, a conspiracy to do something that is legal means that the conspirators will face no repercussions for not revealing the conspiracy: as far as they're concerned, the value proposition is all in keeping silent and there's no gain in it for them (and often quite a bit of punishment) for yapping. Furthermore, the nature of the enterprise being legal means that to maintain secrecy the conspirators are able to establish an effective bureaucracy to deter leaks: scrupulously collecting evidence of who has access to what materials at what time. Obviously an illegal conspiracy would not be seeking to create a parallel paper trail where it exhaustively collects data on the discrete nature of criminality of the various participants.
A Nice Bit of Low-Stakes Culture War: Brady Tkachuk returns to Ottawa
Brady Tkachuk is an NHL hockey player. He's the unfortunate-looking son of former NHL player Keith Tkachuk and younger brother of Matthew Tkachuk, Brady was drafted by the Ottawa Senators and was their captain for five years. This offseason he was traded to the Florida Panthers, his brother's team. Yesterday was his first game back in Ottawa.
The crowd was very, very mad. It's the most hostile return for a player to his old team in a long time, maybe decades.
So what gives?
Sports fans don't like it when a star player leaves the team; that shouldn't need an explanation, but there's a culture war angle to it too. The Tkachuk saga sits perfectly within the current rancor between the US and Canada. Well more specifically it exists pretty much just between the Trump administration and Canada, but since both the younger Tkachuks are perceived (accurately) to be Trump supporters that distinction only makes the Canadian reaction more intense. Hockey as a sport definitely leans conservative, especially among the players, and a number of American stars specifically cited Trump as an inspiration for their 2024 Gold Medal victory over Canada.
Brady is part of a trend of American stars in Canadian markets wanting out. There's a team USA group chat where American stars are supposedly being pressured by their peers to move: Tkachuk, Connor Hellebuyck, Quinn Hughes, and Dylan Larkin are all supposedly examples of this in action. This is basically one step above a conspiracy theory but the trend exists and certainly lots of (bitter) Canadian hockey fans believe it. More plausible is that Tkachuk wanted to play with his brother and was going to refuse to re-sign in Ottawa. Brady is a classic example of a player you love having on your team and hate everywhere else, so that combined with the normal tribalistic response to departing players further aggravates things. The Panthers also have a reputation as a very dirty (and worse, successful!) team, so that's a source of anger too. There were rumours and claims, real and imagined, of various grudges and beefs between current Senators fans and management with Tkachuk.
Throw all the frustrations of the trade war and Trump on top of this, plus Ottawa being a government town, and you've got a recipe for a mad crowd and a great spectacle. And it was great spectacle: the crowd was loud and angry, Brady scored the first goal to get the fans on edge, and then the home team came back and crushed them 5-1. One of the more enjoyable and intense regular season hockey games in recent history.
See, the Culture War doesn't have to ruin everything. Sometimes it just adds the right amount of spice.
johnfabian
23d ago
Obviously no one got up and said "I'm wrong", but climate issues have taken a back seat to open borders / Palestine as the things that the left cares about.
This is certainly true. I've gone to many environmental meetings/protests over the year and they have withered in the past few years. Though I would say a lot of this isn't necessarily that the environment has shrunk in salience, it's just that for a certain activist cohort it has been replaced as the issue by which to advance the omnicause. There were people who thought that the way they were going to abolish capitalism was by convincing people that capitalism was the fundamental cause of climate change. Now those people are saying capitalism is the root cause of the genocide in Gaza. I would say those people probably care about the environment just as much as before (which is to say, very little).
johnfabian
23d ago
For one example, as of now in 2026 the climate alarmism was finally admitted to be made up or whatever.
I do not know what this is referring to.
That the majority should govern in a representative, constitutional democracy does not equate at all to rule of the mob.
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