I’m not terribly familiar with Brazil’s politics or economics, but I’d wager they’re implying the hazards of becoming a direct, unambiguous threat to (external/private) capitalism. Canada’s not too big to become a banana republic, if enough forces get behind manufacturing consent for war special military operations.

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.

Maybe men should start supporting each other. You know, as long as admitting to having feelings isn’t too gay or whatever.

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.

I can’t speak to the construction value of wood species that grow in the Amazon, aside from it being home to some species that are prized for high-end uses but are most definitely not sustainable or even economical to harvest at the scale needed for construction anyway.

But North America is covered with temperate forests loaded with a mix of hardwood and softwood, and boreal forest above that that are predominantly softwood. The hardwood species available have really good structural and furniture making properties while growing relatively fast (for large hardwoods). Most (virtually all) of the construction lumber is softwood, which grows very fast. It has no value for furniture nor is great for large beams and such, but it’s quite suitable for plywood, studs, and leftovers that make good structural sheet goods, paper products, etc. It also gets used as a substrate for hardwood veneers, stretching the dearer hardwood way farther.

What’s more, harvesting softwood is super easy. The ground is mostly firm and relatively flat, so large machinery can just roll in and start yoinking trunks, which are also pretty straight and tall. It’s relatively trivial to pile them onto a truck for transport to the nearest sawmill. The only processing done in-situ is stripping the branches which don’t make up much of the material – I don’t know if the branches are even collected for byproduct inputs.

Boreal and temperate forests can replace sustainably harvested softwood in as little as 30 years. Even shitty clear cutting methods are ready for the next clear cut in 50 years if seedlings are actively planted. That’s how a company like Irving can lay waste to the countryside and then brag about what great environmentalists they are because they plant so many trees. 🙄

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.

Frankly we should have been putting export taxes on lumber all along. Or we could just charge higher stumpage fees, but at least we can justify that as minimizing input costs on housing. It’s insane that we blindly leave all profit to private business harvesting public resources in a manner optimized for volume.

We effectively are subsidizing our forestry sector just so it can undercut a U.S. private forestry industry that is, as far as I can tell, healthier in both ecological and market terms.

North America is where wood is cheap and plentiful. It’s also more sustainable anyway. There’s even been some moves to go back to wood in larger structures, using processing techniques that reduce its flammability.

Also since South America is the only other place in america, it might be more insightful to frame the question around that.

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.

The bedrock of their economic calculus is a disbelief that they could ever possibly net profit by spending on other people. As I said in the last paragraph of this comment, it is their concept of society itself that is limited/constrained in scope, and that has nothing to do with money.

You’re weighing the cost of fixing a problem now vs later, and they’re clinging to the idea that because they’re not the victims of that problem (currently nor in their own optimistic projections), it would be best to simply never solve it at all. But talking about cost to (an intentionally vague) us is generally more acceptable (and compelling) to a liberal society than its counterpart – dehumanizing whomever currently pays it.