domain:firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com
The Canadian government is increasing the capital gains tax for the relatively well off. They claim it only affects 0.13% of Canadians, but this is a lie, since capital gains are extremely lumpy, mostly affecting estates. A much larger share of the population will be in that 0.13% at some point in their lives. The tax will affect a lot of middle class people, distort the economy, and, as I'll explain at the end, redistribute wealth to foreigners.
Currently, 50% of capital gains count towards your taxable income and so you'd pay half the marginal rate, which tops out at between 44.5% and 54.8% depending on which province or territory you live in. The new rule would raise the portion of capital gains that is taxable from half to two thirds for capital gains over $250,000. Primary residences are exempt and it doesn't affect tax protected savings accounts like RRSP and the relatively new TFSA. Most people don't save enough to have savings outside of these accounts and their primary residences, but you certainly don't need to be rich to do so. You could be someone who chose never to own his primary residence and increased savings in the stock market instead. You could own a cottage, to which the capital gains tax applies when you either give it to your children or when you die. Lots of middle class people will be affected.
The capital gains tax is actually a very unfair and even absurd tax. You invest after-tax income from your salary and then when you realize a gain on those savings, even if it's just enough to keep up with inflation such that you have no real gain, you pay taxes again. Someone who is equally wealthy but doesn't save his income for as long would pay less tax. So it taxes savers more than spenders and discourages investment. There are further distortions due to the fact that primary residences are exempt, which incentivizes people to save by investing in their primary residences, inflating property values and making housing more expensive.
This brings me to my last point. The Liberals are far behind the Conservatives in the polls and an election is at most a year and a half away. The main issues tanking their popularity are housing and immigration, particularly for young people, who see a connection between those two issues. Older people don't care so much and are happy to see their property values rise (property values have risen far out of proportion to incomes in recent decades). However, this new tax rule is being promoted in the name of generational fairness.
This makes no sense. The Liberals have dramatically increased the immigration rate, which certainly has inflated property values. There are good arguments to defend this, among them that the higher property values are a net gain for Canada since the vast majority of property is owned by Canadians and most Canadians are homeowners. It really only hurts renters whose parents aren't homeonwers and therefore won't inherit that wealth. Most young Canadians, even if they rent, have parents who are benefiting from this and therefore shouldn't really complain (although they do). Now, the government is doing the one thing that messes this up: they're redistributing much of those gains to the younger generations who include, in very large and increasing numbers, immigrants and their children. What is the point of inflating asset prices with immigration if you're just going to redistirbute the gains to those immigrants? If your goal is to be maximally charitable to immigrants, fine, but this is not in the best interests of Canadians.
The tax increase does exempt primary residences, but not other assets like secondary residences, and the reason for this tax increase is to fund the enormous increase in spending on things like subsidies for new home buyers and affordable housing. The deficit has ballooned to $40 billion dollars under Trudeau and I think the government is actually starting to get desperate and trying to think of ways to raise revenue without spending political capital. Corporations and trusts will also pay this higher capital gains tax. This will reduce business investment. The tax seems calculated to actually raise a fair bit of money while minimizing the number of people who think they'll have to pay it.
Are we pretending Yanukovych wasn't overthrown?
Are we pretending Yanukovych wasn't fleeing the country rather than being procedurally removed from office for granting himself the authority to shoot not only the supporters of his political opponents but also the supporters of his unity government partners that he brought into his own government, at the direct pressure of the foreign government that he fled to after his own party loyalists didn't want to conduct a bloodbath?
And are we going to pretend that giving yourself authority to shoot political opponents in the streets without legislative support wouldn't drive legislature retaliation against an Executive clearly bowing to foreign government pressure and incentives?
I am as familiar with the Yanukovych coup narratives as you, and probably a bit more familiar with various political events during Euromaidan, including the ever-handy reference to the conspiracy theory that the US Ambassador discussing candidates for Yanukovych's invitation for a unity government and considering people who could work with Yanukovych and others was actually plotting a coup against the person who she was going to discuss the candidate list with in the coming days.
Perhaps you'd like to raise the protestor-sniper theories that justified the claim to shoot-to-kill authorities, which I might counter with the state sniper evidence and various security service suspect defections to Russia in the investigations after? Or perhaps you want to make the position that the protestors had no right to protest against the sovereign right of the government to join the Eurasian Union economic association, after Yanukovych made a rather abrupt about face on the already-sovereign-agreed to European Union association agreement that was followed by Russian pressure and incentive campaigns? Maybe you'd like to retreat to the defense of Eastern Russo-phile suppression of the Russian speakers, who were so uninterested in joining in the Russian novarussia campaign that the Russian millitary had to directly intervene to keep the separatist republics from collapsing?
Come now, there's so much history we can banter on!
2D3D
29d ago
If Ukrainians didn't want to fight, they won't. People have their own agency, and no amount of cajoling and money got the Pashtuns to fight for 'Afghanistan' or Cubans to fight against Castro. Remember that Azov started as a wholly domestic Mariupol militia because they really really hated Russians, and Slovyansk had a shitload of people leave because they did not want to stay under Russian - sorry 'Novorossiya' rule. I maintain that if the west pulled all support entirely to Ukraine we would see many more one way suicide drone strikes against refineries, and that the west is maintaining support to Ukraine to avoid further collapse of energy market infrastructure
Most arguments about Russia busting sanctions and their army being regenerated are cope. Muscovy resents being looked down on; their pretensions of continued luxury with their cheap chinese knockoffs and inability to be seen buying the real deal in Paris or Milan smarts far more than just not wearing it, not to mention the endless bitching from Muscovites about their life now being more difficult. Similarly, the Russian army going from BMPT (or more realistically BMP3) to MTLB and BMP1 is hardly an upmuscling of the RuAF (a different argument about whether upgrading from MTLB to BMP3 makes any difference can be made but thats separate to this thread.)
Ultimately, the Russians are likely to grind through the Ukrainians regardless, but the sanctions will leave them an embittered and lesser (in their own eyes) people, deservedly disrespected for their incompetence at defeating their weak and corrupt cousins at the outset and resorting to WW2 era cope.
Gaashk
29d ago
So I guess looking at Coffee Enjoyer's list:
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media restrictions -- common and generally seems like a good idea. Even secular academics like Jonathan Haidt are now advocating for this. I'm unsure how much I want to apply it personally, though -- so far very little.
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simplicity -- I'm not sure that I've seen this seriously attempted, or what exactly it means in most contexts. For instance, look at a grown up homeschooler Paula at the Cottage Fairy Youtube channel. In general, I like her, and she likes to talk a lot about simplifying her life and home, and about "simple living," but actually, she's always buying craft kits off of Etsy, filming complex shots from multiple angles, moving her artwork around, and dusting the bundles of dried herbs artfully decorating her wall space. I sort of get what she means (contrasted with a complex social and work life in a city, more or less), but also somewhat don't (contrasted with playing DnD with friends once a week in the city? Going to bars? I'm not actually completely sure) People in Bronte novels sometimes advocated for it seriously, and they seemed to mean only owning three dresses, all of them grey, keeping one's hair in the same basic bun every day, without curls or lace, and only leaving the house to go to church. This has been found undesirable and left untried in my circles.
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social competition predicated on virtue -- I'm not very clear on this one, either. It seems to depend somewhat on the virtues that are most focused on. The people I most genuinely respect seem to be the "beauty will save the world" sorts. The ones who were eventually disgraced, their daughters prostitutes, their wives divorced, focused very hard on controlling other people in their household, to get them to act virtuous for social credit. Mostly, the men seemed fine and stable, but often boring and bored. There were a few years where several of them got really into Wild At Heart, with not only book studies and conferences, but also a salmon fishing trip and beating on drums in the forest. Our church bought the pastor a claymore sword. The men occasionally got a beer together, despite mostly not drinking. It seemed interesting sociologically, related to contemporary alienation. Several of these men worked a engineers at a missile company, and came home every night to their two to six basically fine children and an expectation to "give everything to God," but it's still important to provide for the children, so nothing too wild is on the table, really.
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emphasis on tradition -- I suppose that the people I grew up with were mostly in the American Evangelical tradition, where it is traditional to talk a lot about the unimportance of following traditions of man, and then there are traditions like giving testimonies and going on mission trips. I did traditional to my family things like reading George MacDonald and complaining about Calvinism. Then I was Orthodox, so of course there are general traditions, much talk about Tradition vs traditions, and some people went around checking out the different cultural traditions and cobbling things together. This is all a worthy project, but fairly complex in America, in a way I don't think Coffee Enjoyer is representing realistically.
Don't know why you're trying make a mess of history on the matter. Even the regime change wing of the State Department admits of their activities in Russia's backyard and the very thing I'm calling it out for.
I'm not sure why you believe Global Research .ca, an anti-globalization conspiracy website, represents the regime change wing of the State Department, but this would be both an incorrect citation and not a rebuttal to the post on hyper and hypo agency.
And as such, Russia's response is reasonable in turn to US' operations in their sphere of influence.
Similarly, you seem to have missed that point that he was making fun of the argument structure, and not actually making a position that your argeement with would advance your position.
2D3D
29d ago
This forum has a refreshing readiness to highlight bad take faiths, one of which is that Ukrainians actually really want to be Russians are are only being forced to fight by the cruel machinations of the West. That the pro-ru position overlaps between antiprogressives (tolerated here) and antiwest socialists (disrespected for good reason) is why bad takes are entertained even briefly, so long as the decorum of the forum is maintained. Calling '5000 word deep dives on videogames' cringe while your own takes are superior is, to my view, straining the boundaries of decorum.
2D3D
29d ago
That the Russians suck at playing the international soft power game is their own fault. If the Russians couldn't even get a literal clown who performed for Putin to be their puppet, thats on them. Russians are hardly moral innocents reacting against a big mean west, they have continually acted (often incompetently) in their own interests against the west, and to give Russians the benefit of he doubt is an invitation to have your exposed back stabbed.
This is blatantly not true: The US refused to make a guarantee to Russia that Ukraine would not join NATO.
This is untrue. Offers that Ukraine would not join NATO were made and duly ignored, on grounds that the US would not make unamendable changes to the US Constitution that were beyond the US Executive's ability to offer in order to meet the level of Russian demands for what a legal guarantee would consist of, which entailed requirements that no future legislature or executive could change their position on.
As the ability to prevent future administrations for reconsidering a policy, a legislature proposing a law, or constitutional amendment from reversing an amendment would require a level of legalistic restriction that the US has never negotiated in its history, and which the Russians have never negotiated upon themselves, it was a notably new and novel proposal for Russia's concerns on how an already vetoed state would not enter NATO. (It was also a unilateral demand as Russia reserves the sovereign right to walk away from treaties they sign, and had done so repeatedly in contemporary history at the time.)
Of course, these demands were also made when Russia had already was in the midst of the final operational preparations for the invasion, and was in the process of generating casus belli justifications and justification narratives, so the sincerity of the Russian interest in the specific demand is highly suspect given their familiarity with US government structure, and the concurrent demands for NATO withdrawals from former warsaw pact states as equally unrealistic demands that served little role other than to say that it was the Americans who refused to negotiate in good faith.
SwordOfOccam
29d ago
Your inability to comprehend the Iranian government’s underlying motivation and the causal chain that brought us to the present situation is remarkable.
They’re not secretive about it. I’m making no claim about their ideology that you can’t hear from their own mouths. Do you think they support Hamas and Hezbollah just for fun?
If I’m understanding you, you somehow think that the Israelis could simply choose to be friends with Iran by deciding to stop being friends with the Saudis and/or the US. Just a simple switching of teams. Iran and Israel’s enmity is because Israel has chosen to side with the Arabs and the US against Iran. The Saudis and the Iranians are rivals primarily over oil and longstanding ethnic rivalries. Iran and the US are at odds primarily because we support the Saudis and interfere with Iran’s ambitions. The Iranian regime’s particular brand of Islam is not the most significant driving force behind their ambitions in the region. The Iranian regime is just a standard mostly rational actor jockeying for power in its region, where nearly everyone has united against them. Iran would welcome Jewish allies against the Arabs if they would offer.
That’s my honest attempt to characterize what you’ve written.
Did you come up with these views on your own, or is there somewhere this is a common view?
Miranda's ass tipping the domino that launched a chain reaction leding to the collapse of the skyscraper of game writing, makes absolutely no sense.
I know we disagree off and on, but may I commend you for making me laugh out loud at this visualization? The scaling alone...
I used to argue with white nationalists a lot many years ago on /r/anarcho_capitalism and what I found very frustrating is they refused to properly defend their point of view, particularly on the point of who counted as white. The rare time they would say, it was usually strictly people born on the European continent, so Turks in East Thrace were white but not Turks on the other side of the Bosporus strait were not, I guess. Attempts to pin them down on definitions like this were taken as bad faith tricks to undermine their cause and there was not a lot of interest in having real intellectual discussion about the merits of white nationalism. I found I could get them to explain why they thought whites were superior to non-whites, but I could not get anywhere discussing the practicalities of how a white ethno-state would work.
I completely agree that it makes more sense to select immigrants by the traits that whites are claimed to possess. Selecting them based on race is extremely crude.
Walt seemed like he was participating in good faith, but I found he rambled on a lot and would have preferred to have him pinned down more on some of these issues. I think he reinforced my impression of the alt-right, which is not that they were a bunch of super intellectual misfits but that they actually had terrible epistemic habits and were white nationalists more for the vibes as the kids say rather than its intellectual merits. I've read some of Richard Spencer's stuff and seen interviews with him. He's not that smart. I haven't been impressed by anything from the alt-right as far as intellectual arguments go.
I think that's separate from believing in human biodiversity. It's the leap from human biodiversity to white nationalism that I have never found convincing. I think there is a parallel here with communists, who are extremely difficult to convince to enter into a serious debate. Attempts to debate communists are shot down as risking undermining class solidarity. Similarly, attempts to debate white nationalists are shot down (though not nearly as quickly and definitively) as risking undermining white racial solidarity.
Another parallel is how communists put a huge amount of effort into debating theory (though not at addressing the best counter-arguments to that theory as they mostly only debate other communists) and almost none in how a communist society would actually work.
BahRamYou
29d ago
It depends. There are times when having a larger house is really nice. Like, you can host the entire extended family to sleep over on holiday vacations (which require a lot of long-distance travel). Much better than making them stay in a hotel or filling up the floor like a flophouse. It's also nice if you have hobbies that need a lot of space.
But yeah, too often the space just is either filled up with junk by hoarders, or not used for anything at all. A lot of people end up low on cash because they're paying for a much larger house than they really need, and stressed out from having to clean and maintain it all. Also a lot of houses are designed only to maximize space, so they end up with kind of an awkward layout and thin walls. In @f3zinker's example of "why not rent out the basement," well, it would probably be very awkward. You'd be stuck sharing the kitchen and maybe a bathroom with these strangers, and there's only one door to the house, and you'd fight over garage space because you all need your own car, and you'd have to agree on what temperature to set the thermostat, and you'd hear all the noise they make in the basement because it's not well insulated, and yadda yadda yadda.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
29d ago
Huh? I don't endorse the author's evaluation, as I do not believe Israel is entitled to even greater American support. Protesting American displeasure is pure arrogance on Israeli part.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
29d ago
Suppose we reverse stock photos in this picture.
Does it look like a snide suggestion that immigrants struggle with learning English?
Glassnoser
29d ago
I'm a bit confused by this concept. Elsewhere, I've read that Scotland should also be on the other side of the line. Is this actually a robust concept and does it really explain anything?
Tretiak
29d ago
It doesn't seem you're interested in discussing anything history or policy related at this point. I see little value in further discussion. Be well.
Tretiak
29d ago
I'm not sure why you believe Global Research .ca, an anti-globalization conspiracy website, represents the regime change wing of the State Department, but this would be both an incorrect citation and not a rebuttal to the post on hyper and hypo agency.
And where would you expect to see the other side that vested western interests have an interest in keeping suppressed? CNN? Fox? MSNBC? How about the world's foremost critic of US foreign policy? Or is he just a senile old man at this point?
Similarly, you seem to have missed that point that he was making fun of the argument structure, and not actually making a position that your argeement with would advance your position.
You're the one who obliged with the logic of that statement. Makes it difficult to argue against if you stand with it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
29d ago
Among those scientists present at the White House talks were Professor John Schellnhuber, former chief environmental adviser to the German government and head of the UK’s leading group of climate scientists at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. He said that the Pentagon’s internal fears should prove the ‘tipping point’ in persuading Bush to accept climatic change.
Bob Watson, chief scientist for the World Bank and former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, added that the Pentagon’s dire warnings could no longer be ignored.
So scientists find a speculative report by non-scientists and trumpet it as 'this is why you should reduce Co2 emissions'. It's just like the IPCC reports. They're tremendously dull documents that say things like 'high confidence that water stress will moderately increase in the medium term' and don't mention any existential threat except to Pacific islands. Meanwhile Extinction Rebellion is screeching about the apocalypse. Meanwhile governments are signing legal targets that commit them to deindustrialization and high energy costs, shutting down farms and so on.
There's a gap between what actual scientists are saying and what the message flowing through to policymakers, celebrities, media and the public is. Rather like COVID, the real science on mass-scale mask use was mixed and unclear, yet the Science mandated them.
James Hansen is/was screeching about disaster, the Arctic was supposed to melt about 10 years ago: https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1988&dat=20080624&id=7mgiAAAAIBAJ&sjid=7qkFAAAAIBAJ&pg=5563,4123490
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
29d ago
Strelkov started the chain of events that bubbled up to the war.
You're talking about 2014 here, right? If so, then sure, that checks out.
Putin didn't "just woke up" and create a war, there was already a war.
There was the frozen conflict that had been bubbling since 2014, but 2015-2021 was massively different from the invasion in 2022. There was little reason that status quo couldn't continue for another decade at least from the West's perspective, but then Putin decided he was unsatisfied with the state of affairs and that's how the invasion came to be.
I'm not saying there was no conflict prior to 2022. I'm saying the massive invasion itself that happened in 2022 was Putin's doing.
I don't think we're disagreeing on this point.
This is blatantly not true: The US refused to make a guarantee to Russia that Ukraine would not join NATO.
This was not a change, at least on the US's part! The US didn't let Ukraine join NATO, but they didn't rule it out either, same as 2015-2021. The US wanted to kick the can down the road some more (or indefinitely) by keeping Ukraine in limbo, and it was Putin who said that wasn't good enough now.
Dean
29d ago
I commend you for recognizing a rare piece of insight that many don't realize. Both the premise that a leash can be tugged from both ends, and that military aid is as much a means to regulate as to enable violence.
An example of almost certainly-not-sanctioned Ukrainian resistance to Russia was the Nordstream pipeline explosion, which on further investigation was very likely- and plausibly- a Ukrainian operation of considerably sparse means of not much more than a rental boat, some divers, and far-from-impossible to procure explosions. As a result, the entire German economic strategy was derailed as the strategic premise of Nordstream blew apart, every resistance group around the world gained a sudden interest in scuba certification, and Russia lost its monopoly on under-seas infrastructure violence that it had been trying to leverage until then. Every power in the region had reason enough to cover it and pay it no further mind, not least because the people who would have wanted to take issue with Ukraine for doing so couldn't stop it from happening again, and there ceased to be an economic case for breaking with NATO in favor of Russia when any of the people between Germany and Russia could blow up the business case of Russian energy.
Giant geopolitical and global economic implications, teensy little boat. And not something particularly seen sense, despite impressively deep Ukrainian special forces intrusions to strike deep within Russia.
Tretiak
29d ago
I don't know how well read you are on the history of what happened...
Seems we both agree at the outset that he was democratically elected, do we not? His overthrow was explicitly supported by the US and it's allies. Are you not aware that there was even leaked audio of Victoria Nuland and the Ukraine's Ambassador that revealed deliberate planning of his overthrow? NATO was never a European alliance of 'peace', it's an alliance that's aimed at destabilizing Eastern Europe, with the intention to weaken Russia. Do forgive a homie for challenging American imperialism unipolarity. This whole quagmire has absolutely zero to do with high minded moral idealism against the Next Hitler, who at the same time the media tells us is losing, running out of gas, is out of ammunition, is incompetent beyond belief; and simultaneously is preparing for world domination and his next target is going to be Poland or Scandinavia. It has everything to do with continued projecting of American and western geopolitical dominance across the planet.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
29d ago
It wasn't with the opposite valence but rather in a goofy thread about bats vs knives about a month ago. The use of the word "retard" probably didn't help, but the part about not being able to vote was also quoted by the mod giving the person a warning.
And I'd say that probably should be a warnable or banable thing to say. Saying a group of people is so stupid that their right to vote should be taken away is a textbook case of "boo outgroup".
This quote came to mind when you asked what is white Nationalism.
A lady asked Dr. Franklin Well Doctor what have we got a republic or a monarchy – A republic replied the Doctor if you can keep it.”
White People - are those who can keep it. Propagate self-governance. Live as free people in a functional complex society
Non-white - are the people who can not self-govern or contribute to its existence.
In the American context which uses an expanding term of whiteness it’s basically anyone who can replicate and reproduce the ideals expressed in the founding of the nation.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
29d ago
Huh? Nobody's obligated to either respond to an entire post or nothing at all. I called out a bit I found particularly objectionable.
I could easily turn it back on you: why did you respond to MY comment without addressing the issue of whether a statement like "is too stupid to be allowed to vote" should be disallowed or not?
I accept your concession of your limited perception with good cheer.
Sure, you made a silly historical metaphor while trying to ignore the inconvenient parts that ruin it as a simile. History's hard. Fortunately, this is the motte, and asinine positions are for being flanked, spanked, and penetrated as a result.
Modern Russia is certainly doing things the modern US wouldn't approve of in its own defense, not least of which is invading adjacent countries in territorial expansionism on irredentalist grounds based in the past. American warmongers of the current generation, as everyone has familair examples of, invade far-away countries on ideological grounds driven far more by humanitarian considerations/rationals in the present.
Even if you wanted to appeal to the 1800s Americas, back when it was run by racist imperialist most Americans would be appalled by and oppose today if a mirror-US magically appeared, the expansionist era American imperialists didn't rely on claims historical conquest to justify their conquests. They just resorted to the sort of lovably mockable jingoism and manifest destiny that's parodied, and no one believes or particularly claims that the Mexican-American war was a defensive war.
The fact that you tried appeal to a war the better of a century ago- to a war that was declared against rather than by the US by the perpetrators rather than defendent of territorial aggression- to force some kind of equivalence between the modern US-Japan relationship and the ongoing attempt to subjugate Ukraine kind of shows you missed the mark on historical metaphors. The US-Japan relationship of 2020 isn't the relationship of 1950, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine is not aiming to establish a relationship of 2020 US-Japan.
Now, if you argument is instead that Japan is analogous to Russia, and that Russia should be nuked and forced into unconditional surrender in order to be occupied and forcibly reconstructed as Japan was, that might be an interesting historical parallel to make...
I'd rather you devise a competent metaphor than be introspective. Naval gazing and whataboutism is easy, but not particularly impressive. Competence is hard.
I will submit that you likely think you are far more informed than you are, but that you also don't care when you make a bad historical claim with more relevant differences than similarities.
If you care to disagree with my position on historical differences mattering... let's hear it!
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