ofcourse

The era of US-Canada being brothers in arms is over. I doubt US will be receiving any favors in the future without something in return. And if Canada chooses to expand their supply chains outside of the US, which they 100% should, there’ll be no coming back to a scale of trade as it exists today.

Athletes have always leveraged unfair advantages in sports. There’s a reason there’s super tall players in basketball and short ones in gymnastics. May be they should enforce that average height of teams must match global averages. Countries with fewer resources just can’t support athletes in many sports so why not make that more fair?

There’s research showing that some women athletes (i.e., born with female reproductive organs) have higher testosterone levels than many men, and even some male athletes. So why are they allowed to compete in women sports instead of men?

There’s a lot of ways to make sports more fair. Banning transgender people without fair science based facts is not one of them and is plain bigotry. It’s like saying an athlete on anti-depressants should be banned because they are happier and more motivated so have an unfair advantage.

Because isn’t there a recent article saying most of Tesla parts are imported from Mexico! Daddy Musk wants them cheap cheap parts.

1. Rampant unchecked capitalism of recent decades has created large wealth disparities akin to the earlier decades of the last century. It is no longer possible for one person in a household with a regular job to support a modest lifestyle for their family. All benefits especially medical for the whole family, being completely intertwined with the current job reduces mobility and further feeds into the wealth gap by keeping wages low. It’s easier to blame the powerless for this state of affairs than the powerful because the powerless cannot object.
2. The fear of the other has been accentuated by media and misinformation. Targeted algorithms feeding most of the information that is consumed has created echo chambers that reinforce existing beliefs and fears. The propaganda state has never had it easier.
3. The large military and police has given never before control to the state about what is allowed to be protested. Combined with the day to day struggles, it’s extremely hard to come together for what is right. The ruling class is able to maintain the fine balance between absolute misery and general dissatisfaction that it is still better to struggle through a thankless job than to say fuck it. Failures of recent large uprisings like Middle East and Hong Kong have reinforced the futility of standing up against the rulers.
4. Evil has many heads and there’s always one head that you can find alignment with. It could be the deregulation of businesses, lower taxes, anti abortion, racism, but as long as there’s one thing you can align on, the general sense of powerlessness makes it easier to overlook the other heads.
5. The line between evil and good has never been murkier, especially with globalization. If you focus on the betterment of your community, it would be considered good, but what if it leads to suffering of others outside the community. Is it also evil? What is community - is it the people in your neighborhood, your religion, your country, fellow business owners? The fuzzier these lines are, the harder it is to untangle them.

I can see a company not wanting to invest resources in a social media platform without critical mass. But for a company that itself is trying to gain critical mass, moving away from a similarly situated privacy focused platform is idiotic. It signals to potential Proton users that the company cannot be trusted and it’s very hard to recover from that.

The list also needs to include and track the amount of money spent on lawsuits from fired employees and contractors/departments/states whose contracts were cancelled.

This is finances 101 from Wall Street. Show short term cost reduction which makes the shareholders giddy despite the reductions causing long term and secondary losses. And just like the institutional shareholders, the orange and nazi buffoons and their lackeys are in cahoots lining their pockets through self interest dealings while the public will be covering the eventual losses through their taxes.

Not only is it perfectly legal but the executives would argue that they are bound by their fiduciary duty to their shareholders. Layoffs increase stock price => shareholders make money => shareholders approve bonus for executives.

Social media and their engagement maximizing algorithms.

GenZ don’t watch TV or read print media so almost 100% of their news is getting filtered through an algorithm that has the sole purpose to keep them hooked. Hell, even search results are biased. One really has to go out of their way to get facts outside of a personalized feed.

GenZ are definitely not the reason we have a buffoon as a president and a psychopath as his controller. This article about GenZs changing their views says more about their willingness to think critically than all the older voters who have chosen not to despite the 2017-21 hell.

I wouldn’t blame anyone resigning voluntarily over this. Can you imagine the energy, dedication and countless hours they’d have put into building this case only to have it thrown away on a whim?! It would be close to impossible to stay motivated in any job after something like this. Honestly, good on them for prioritizing their safety and mental health over a thankless job.

This is how the Republicans are really gutting the government - by breaking the spirits of the most dedicated employees. This regime is going to be the biggest shock to US government since Reagan and the American people will be suffering from its impacts for decades.

That is indeed a problem that needs to be resolved, and likely through ranked choice voting. But as a country, we tend to focus too much on the presidential election. Change will have to start in the congressional elections - both at federal and state levels. The issue of votes splitting will be a lesser issue in these elections except in a few large districts. That will also be where smaller fundraising campaigns would go further.

In the last 2 decades, the major English bloc of US, Canada, UK and Australia has been in lock step toward the shift to the right. I think it is no coincidence that it aligns with the meteoric rise of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. To satiate his incredible greed, his media organizations have fed into people’s fears and laid down the groundwork for today’s social media companies promoting inflammatory content to maximize engagement. I don’t know if democracy can survive without reining in popular media and significantly reducing biased and false reporting.

Progressives need to start their own party. The establishment DNC is so entrenched with big donors and lobbyists that it is unable to serve the people. Their balancing act of appeasing both the right and the left is just serving to alienate everyone because the final policies get so diluted. They have become too stuck in the quagmire of their own doing. I don’t see the DNC being able to change any time soon and through their inaction, will only enable more devastation of the country.

The new Progressive party should align with the DNC as the opposition during this administration but simultaneously run more like minded candidates in the next elections with their own separate fundraising campaigns. That’s the only hope I have for meaningful change to happen.