A broken clock is right twice of the day, but we don’t call it a working clock. And it’s worse when the clock actually works somewhat and changes its speed to match more times of the day.

I took at look at the synopsis of The Cult Smashers, and I wonder if it’d be easier to reach a wider audience if readers were going into the stories not armed with their presumptions about Jan 6th, not primed with the understanding that they are reading a book about human politics. These are what many would consider “heavy topics”, that some would think they should set themselves up mentally before diving into them. Perhaps it’s easier to start the story with something close enough to life to feel relatable, evoking some sort of emotional familiarity and hence comfort with the initial premise of the story, as it unravels and reveals how that world, where things work differently from ours.

As far as decentralized and the open source movement goes, I’m glad it’s actually gotten to a place where it feels somewhat comfortable and isn’t just scaffolding all around, always at the verge of disappearing into nothingness. It is difficult for such a culture to continue surviving in the sort of… societal climate (shall we say) that we have today, but I do believe that the seed has been planted, and it will always continue to exist in some form.

That said, Nature (as in, Ziran, or shall I write 自然) will take its course, but I do think that even its destruction, at least in the context of Earth, is a very possible future, thanks to the extended deviation we humans have taken. Climate change is itself a way Nature presents itself due to the changes within, and we already know how it can be the most unforgiving and violent phenomenon we humans have witnessed. We will be eliminated, lest we as a species realize our connection to Nature and its Path / Principle / Order.

Of course, if we exercise some optimism, it’s not impossible that a more grassroots form of a more cooperative society that values knowledge, as a subculture, would take hold. There are forces that seem to try really hard at fighting it, many of which are people who are well-known to us today, and they do win some of their skirmishes, and seem to have gathered enough of their forces to have brought us into the turbulent times we’re in today, but it has also shone a light on what’s at stake and what do they fear. As always, as where there’s despair, hope can be found.

This was an interesting article. Thank you for sharing.

The final two sentences hit me rather hard, despite being someone who just got into their 30s.

I tend towards a more pessimistic opinion that people have very little control over the Dao and instead it simply follows its own path.

A lot of people are very emotionally driven, and inexplicably and unknowingly believe in some kind of destiny, and that some path is already set out for them and they are meant to only walk it. And we see this reflected in basically every major religion, and even the irreligious are sometimes bought into it.

I don’t know how exactly we can change enough minds to help people look at the world around them, and their relationship with it, differently. We could create a grand story with a fictional world that follows those principles, not really in a mythological or religious sense, but simply a story of a different world. It may not immediately garner a sizeable following, and would definitely take a good storyteller to come up with interesting and perhaps even gripping stories that could change how we view life, but perhaps I’m just trying to force myself to be optimistic about humans.

I think you’re either quoting the wrong article, or misread the article. The article talks about the new ownership of The Observer, which is a sister publication to The Guardian.

It’s odd that this “The Standard” publication is the only one that seems to talk about the selling of the Observer and how it was handled, with some even smaller publications. That said, The Standard is majority owned by a Russian oligarch, sometimes sensationalize titles and events, and don’t always have their facts right.

Just to add to your comment, case in point, The Guardian sometimes covers Canadian news, and has recently published a bit more about current Canadian political events. They operate mainly in the UK but have a US office. They are independent and don’t have a corporate backer, and have been working relentlessly covering the events in the US since the new admin took power.

Digressing a bit, I’d urge people to use tools like GroundNews to find out the political leanings and maybe even the corporate owners of news outlets that you come across, and use that to your own judgement.

They’ve been spamming some attack ads about some fake strawman Carney on YT pretty damn aggressively. And idk if I’d ever call whatever they’ve had these last couple years a platform.

Thank you for the message. I don’t find your message to be as much of doomerism than you’ve warned upfront, and if anything, I think you’re being really optimistic, though not in a bad way.

On the topics mentioned under The Carrot, as someone’s who’s technically inclined, I’m not sure if I agree on finding new companies here just to replace the American ones, as it feels like we’re possibly leading ourselves down a similar path where few options exist and money, and power, ends up getting centralized and controlled by random individuals, leading to a possibly oligarchic scenario. What would stop the stakeholders from these companies from installing someone who would place profits before people, if not slowly replacing CEOs over CEOs as they slowly go down that slide? And we already have great decentralized options to replace many, if not all, of these services. Sure, they still have usability issues, but I think things, in this alternative tech landscape, are already in the right direction, even if they aren’t great and may even require a complete rethink. “There is opportunity, but we shouldn’t seek to just replace what’s lost as is,” is what I’m trying to say. If anything, Canada’s been a bit behind as we’ve relied on the US for so much for so long.

I won’t argue against your pessimistic views on life and humanity; I too sometimes think that way. It can be somewhat comforting, maybe in a bit of a twisted way, but it can make us feel a bit better. But I will say that it’s not helpful to others and yourself to keep thinking like so, about how a lot of people just seem too stupid, or that they are born into stupidity and are thus conditioned into thinking that stupidity is the norm, and that there is not real progress.

Real progress is being made, even now, despite all the chaos that we know of. The fact that people can talk about these problems, internationally and openly, despite some threats from those who despise it, is unthinkable 70 years ago, or even 100 years ago, and further. If that’s not progress, I don’t know what is.

History is repeating itself, but it’s not without its differences and variations.

And despair isn’t the end. Where there is despair, there is hope.

While I’m somewhat dejected that I can’t convince you to open up, I hope it becomes part of what you would think about again in the future.

Best wishes there

To the “brainwashing our kids” crowd, my stance is that the kids can decide for themselves if it’s brainwashing, as long as we aren’t actually doing that, and is instead simply equipping them with the ability to think on their own. So I’m not bothered by them, and I think we should make that narrative clear enough, with experts in and out of power to have their say, and the rest can complain all they want. I do understand that that doesn’t always work well in our political climate; just look at the carbon tax, but if we hold ourselves back just because some crowd might fight back, and essentially do nothing, based on the trajectory where things are going, I fear that we’re only sleepwalking ourselves into ruin. This applies to adopting PR as well.

In other words, I’d rather we say that we’ve tried to do things that we have good reasons to believe are good and may actually steer us in the right direction, than go for something that might please more people but is no different from our current trajectory.

If a single issue is enough to make people put their vote into, why wouldn’t a larger party simply make that promise themselves, as long as it still somewhat aligns with their party goals, or is not in the way of their goals, and eat the single-issue platform’s pie?

And if anything, we already have single-issue politics, right within our FPTP system, and I don’t see why this wouldn’t happen under ranked ballots or instant runoff as well. Instead of forming a party, they lobby, and whichever party adopts their stance will win their votes, along with whoever else they can influence. There already is a subset of the electorate that are geared into thinking that way.

I don’t think there’s a good solution to mitigating single-issue politics, perhaps other than good education about our governments and institutions. It certainly isn’t solved under PR, and, as you said, could possibly lead to the proliferation of small single issue parties (though I believe larger parties will absorb their vote by promising the same while offering more), and it certainly exists even today under FPTP, just not as a party but a lobby group, and it will no doubt exist similarly as a lobby group in other winner-takes-all system.

This is somewhat unrelated but I thought it’s worth mentioning cause it’s something that I’ve recently heard from people whom I’ve met. I just need to get it out so that maybe I feel a bit better.

As much as I support this motion, the reality is that there are people who also don’t really care about humans rights or democracy, especially cause they come from countries that do not champion or even prize these concepts. And so they are either used to a world without one, or simply do not think they matter given that worldview. They too may wish for a peaceful life, but personal freedom is optional, and especially when that lack of freedom applies to everyone. They will gladly conform to whatever playing rules there is set out by the powerful so that they can live their own fulfilling lives, not (directly) helping those in power, but also not against them.

This isn’t to say that I support that notion. I think they shouldn’t think that way, as I believe personal freedom would be a better guarantee of not just their own peaceful lives, but also those of their families and especially their children, and for their future generations. It isn’t the only way to live, but it’s an easier path for humanity going forward, instead of having to rely on, in a sense, cunningness to stay alive, and that those without those smarts, or perhaps a little too much courage, to die in vain.

Here I am listening to these people talk about how life isn’t too bad back in their home country, where while they are threatened by their government should they ever say something out of line, they don’t ever plan to say or do things that are out of line and so they’ll mostly be fine. They even believe that they’ll have a pretty good chance at life migrating to Russia’s far east, where they’ll be somewhat outside of the ebbs and flows of Moscow, while having fresh new opportunities.

It’s somewhat sickening to me, so I needed to let it out. I don’t find fault with their way of thinking, but this sort of pessimistic and self-centric worldview makes me feel like the human world has no value existing or worth protecting; we’d literally be no different from animals.

I’m sure this comment will attract all sorts of unwanted attention. I may read replies, if there are any, but I’ll probably ignore them.

Never subbed to Netflix so don’t know the shows there, but that exists, that’s funny as hell.

I just thought the “flying” part was apt when I heard it cause chickens don’t stay in the air for long enough to be a menace.

There’s an even better name: whispers flying cobra chicken

You’re the kind of Trudeau lover that no matter what evidence is presented, you’ll always believe that he’s just some kind of freaking god. He’s gone, good riddance. May we never hear from him again. Go cry in your cereal lol.

Quoting your comment for posterity.

I didn’t even talk about Trudeau or how much I like him or not, and literally gave you a chance to explain what you’re trying to say through the link.

But I think we all see what kind of person you are now.

How about you go back to your little hell hole?

Depends on which one of the flavours we’re talking about. I’m not an expert by any means, but my understanding is that, in general, we could go with the urban/rural approach by breaking up the city into smaller voting districts to reach some kind of acceptable balance in both the population across the city, and the number of MLAs across the region, just to somewhat balance out the urban and rural voices. How big should the rural regions be? I don’t know, cause it’ll be up to whatever census data that we know about the region.

That said though, I never realized it but Barrie is somewhat special from what I can find online, in that it’s politically independent from the Simcoe county. So perhaps it can just continue to be independent from the county? I’m honestly not sure about what being politically independent actually entail.

Sending a link to some opinion piece that doesn’t even discuss the topic at hand is kinda weird. Care elaborating on how these two things are related?

Hi, I believe we’ve had a short chat before.

Your arguments, while I acknowledge them to be valid, are not something that I believe should be addressed by an electoral system.

Why do you think that we have the right to deny, say, a gun freedom advocacy group, for running for office, as much as their taking of the office could be a scary one? If you could give a reason why, how does that prevent someone else to declare that climate advocacy groups shouldn’t run for office, and try to give some reason that sounds sufficiently legitimate to enough people? And what comes next?

The guardrails that you speak of work to shut people off. Is that how a democracy should work?

If an electorate is that concerned with gun freedom, and think that it’s more important than issues such as a dilapidated public infrastructure, then sure, they can vote for whichever party that will support gun freedom, and that party will have a better chance at winning, assuming a healthy voter turnout. This applies to both winner-takes-all systems and PR systems.

But gun freedom is likely not the only issue people have in mind. The gun freedom party can’t just stay as politicians over that one issue. How would they handle foreign relations? What about our national debt? No single issue platform can give us answer to every one of those larger problems.

So I say let these people speak their minds. If enough people actually support them and they have enough support to even form government, then such is the reality of what your nation cares about, and the numbers tell you that.

Or perhaps do you not believe that Canadians are inherently good and reasonable people? Perhaps you think education has really failed this country that people can’t think sufficiently well for themselves? I’m not sure where this issue with, say, religious parties trying to voice their opinions on how they think things should be run, is coming from.

“Let’s give the CEO big bonuses instead of investing it back into our failing business that desperately needs that money.”

Says, apparently, no one at Intel.

Edit: I just realized my punchline was off but I’ll leave it as is anyways. You get the point.

I also want to add that anyone who uses Germany as an example of a potential takeover of extremists under PR does not understand the politics of Germany.

Here’s a video from Real Life Lore about how Germany is still divided: https://youtu.be/c-sOqHD6Pw4 I do not necessarily advocate for this channel, but they have usually presented accurate data, even if the choices of how those data are presented may at times be questionable.

The TLDR/W is this: Germany was divided politically in the past. After reunification, it’s not like East and West Germany essentially mixed and there are now no differences between the two historical sides; quite the opposite actually. They are still very much separated in terms of economic chances and social development, and this leads to a strong distrust and perhaps even hatred of old East Germany to the West.

If anything, it shows that PR works as intended: when a proportional number of people feels like current politics, its trajectory, or just politicking, does not work for them, they get represented because the system allows for it.

Is there anywhere else that’s switched to proportional representation, run-off voting, or similar from FPTP?

https://www.fairvote.ca/how-democracies-adopted-proportional-representation/

How does it affect things like regional representation

https://www.fairvote.ca/localrepresentation/

For example, if we go with MMP, https://www.fairvote.ca/mixed-member-proportional/

If you prefer a video format, https://youtu.be/D3guVBhKmDc

Seems like it creates instances where the candidate from some ridings gets a seat with fewer votes than the other candidate.

Not too sure what you mean by this, but maybe MMP would give you an idea as to what would happen, and whether the scenario you’re thinking of would actually be possible? Lemme know.

I think the urban/rural divide is only going to get worse as technology leads to more migration to urban areas even though it’s the rural population that’s taking care of the fundamentals in our economy.

I don’t really believe that technology is the leading factor to the migration, but economic factors are. This isn’t to say that our farms aren’t profitable (I believe they are and should be), but there simply are more options of work in urban areas. Given that farms take up a lot of space, population ends up being sparse, and so do economic opportunities. It doesn’t have to stay that way of course, perhaps we could rethink how rural life works, e.g. rural Japan, but that’s not only a change in culture but likely also a multi-year work, so I digress.

PR isn’t one electoral system but more so a principle that some systems follow. So it makes more sense to talk about the different systems that implement PR, and see how they can work for us, or if we can give it a bit of a twist so that it can work for us.

Fairvote has another proposed system that aims at the rural/urban divide: https://www.fairvote.ca/rural-urban-proportional/