People think "politics" is what you say, but politics is in fact how you wield power. In that sense, driving a car is one of the most profound ways to reveal what your actual politics are. How people drive reveals the sickness at the heart of our society: wanting power, but not responsibility.

Working at Starbucks in downtown Ottawa 15+ years ago to help stretch the money at the end of the month was a more physically and mentally exhausting job than my current one and it isn't close. And Starbucks is *designed* to be as seamless as possible!

"Sacrifices" for everyone except the wealthy and powerful. A more avowedly radical NDP promising a wealth tax could probably claw a lot of turf back once the elbows up crowd realizes that they got got by Mark Carney.

At this rate you could show up to your campaign launch announcement wearing nothing but tattered boxer shorts and say "yeah, my opponent, uh, whatstheirface, uh, they suck ass. Go me!" and probably have a floor of 20% in voting intentions among Democrats.

Chuck Schumer's next post on this website might well be the most ratio'd post to ever exist here.

This reminds me of the Australian consumer affairs show The Checkout. It was on ABC and I saw it through YouTube. Very Leslie Knope-kinda thing (affectionate) that taught people about their consumer rights. It was cute!

Great and correct observation. This is part of why I think I am more skeptical of "angry progressive" candidates (Fetterman comes to mind) than I am "earnest progressive" candidates (Mamdani).

I feel like doing "if you don't like LLMs you're bigoted" is a pale horse for the entire slop machine industry. This is the last stand of the desperate. For the record: no, you can't be bigoted towards a calculator, whether it calculates words or numbers.

Holy shit is this guy washed. "You deserve better than dying" is about as inspiring a sentiment to rally around as cottage cheese. If the Democrats can't primary and turf this bum, they might as well walk themselves to jail.

Being labelled as "Antifa" (whatever that is) and stomped out of existence by nervous executives may be the only way that SNL could be relevant in the 21st century. On that note, why is our society run by craven mediocrities whose power comes from craven institutions?

Please, for the love of God, primary and bin Chuck Schumer. Dude and his imaginary friends absolutely do not get it, and at this point it has to be willfully so.

The French took four tries to get to a modern republic. No shame in starting from scratch. True for both Canada and the United States.

"See the primitive wallflower freeze/When the jelly-faced women all sneeze/Hear the one with the mustache say, "Jeez, I can't find my knees"" - Bob Dylan, Voices of Johanna Dunno why but it reeks of "we live in a society" to me. Not a Dylan guy, I guess.

I saw Gordon Lightfoot in a cafe in Ontario some 15 years ago. Walked up to him and said, "hey, you're Gordon Lightfoot!", to which he responded "I sure hope so". Didn't have much more to say, but he was a lovely fellow in that brief interaction.

The robot ticketing everyone is good because it’s going to modify behavior in a way that a cop doesn’t and doesn’t want to. Now you have to obey the speed limit instead of the speed of traffic.

Nothing screams sovereignty like having a foreigner open your government and buying into a foreign defense project on your soil! Charles III is a tourist spouting platitudes. A sovereign Canada, one that doesn't double down on colonial extraction, does not need English royalty.

The apotheosis of technocracy--the message doesn't matter, it's a matter of how you feed an unwanted ideology into the electoral algorithm. Reactionaries are odious and evil, but they're honest about their intent to do ill and cause harm in a way technocrats and liberals are not.

Unbelievably hype for Opening Night for the Chatham-Kent Barnstormers.

Two days. That's all it took for Mark Carney's Liberals to betray Canadians based on arcane projections and detached wonkery.

The absolute narcissism of thinking your most important job as an elected official is to get re-elected.

People know when they're being sold pablum and they check out accordingly. Can you imagine anyone volunteering for Chuck Schumer for reasons outside of cynical career-boosting? I can't.

MarkGPT named an AI minister, and it's hard to see this going any way other than the Starmer regime. The question upcoming is which reactionary lunatic Carney is keeping the PM's chair warm for.

The real Papal announcement is the stealthy news-drop from a major sports franchise.

Have we talked about how the neoliberal university is perversely incentivized to maximize student intake regardless of a student's ability to demonstrate the kinds of skills that a university student needs to have?

This is a very Anglo-centric take that reaffirms what Blanchet said about Canada not being a real country. The monarchy is what locks us into a state of quasi-permanent unstatehood. The notion that a German from the UK opening our Legislature is affirming our sovereignty is a farce on its face.

One of my all-time favorites as A White Guy is to stare blankly at a man who said something shitty and say "I don't understand. Could you explain what you meant?" Almost always, the response I get back is a sheepish "oh, uh...it's nothing". Shame is often stronger than rhetoric.

"We can't fight extremism with moderation." -- Good line from Ras Baraka in the recent NJ-GOV debate

nationalpost.com/opinion/cons... Pretty sure somewhere on my timeline was a warning that once Mark Carney was exposed as a neoliberal with mismatched policy goals his transformation into a Kamala campaign would be complete.

Define your musical taste in 6 artists: 1. Tim Hecker 2. Boards of Canada 3. Aesop Rock 4. Aphex Twin 5. billy woods 6. Nujabes

Not enough yay on Earth to celebrate this!

The beginning was when I was getting ready for First Communion and understood transubstantiation to mean that I was going to become a cannibal, and when I told the priest about it he brushed me off and told me to stop thinking about it.

the sickos man is very cold. let him inside

the internet starting to re-fragment into having Actual Websites again as centralized social media self-destructs is unironically one of the absolute best, most positive things happening rn

Semisonic's Closing Time. The number of times I heard that song 3 hours into an 8 hour retail shift...immediate, incandescent outrage.

Hey, I like this enough to repeat it. You can replace "bananas" with any staple, but as a rule if your political leadership can't roughly identify the price of staple foods, they shouldn't be leaders.

Merf

Dear world: After everything, can we have this? Please?

Starting to think that it may be time to split from the Democrats and let Jackson's party die. Weird necro-LARPers are not going to win elections.

But thank goodness @schumer.senate.gov can go on his book tour, right?

Reminder that the threat of veterans marching against the state has historically been one of the most effective engines of revolution.

Between Schumer losing any authority he had and Newsom getting skewered for his shit podcast, it's a bad day for the "we just need to sell out marginalized people and America will love our vague neoliberal platitudes" wing of the Democratic Party. Good riddance.

Erica Ifill: The new Liberal leader is a component of the technocratic elite who got us into this mess of inequality. #cdnpoli

Why is it that the first arguments typically offered by white settlers in Canada about our presumed "toughness" and "independence" are paeans to hockey and booze? It worries me that these banal tropes are the best we seem to be able to think of.

Kamala Carney is here to do a Mitt Romney campaign against a cardboard cutout of the American despot. I have a bad feeling that he's going to lose the public with Democratic-style neoliberal uwu austerity politics either before or after the election. Either way, he is at best a stopgap.

Boutique taxation is bad, example #1,204,980 A good tax regime is simple, progressive, and resistant to fraud. Niche tax cuts ("incentives") are none of these. Furthermore, Musk's corporate empire must be destroyed.

"Detox" is a long-standing bumpkis word that grifters love because it means nothing. The reactionary crunchification of the American state needs to be understood as part of a long-standing transformation of the American economy from production to grift.

Reminder that most of these people are squarely in the income brackets that are going to benefit massively from the policies of the person they're "protesting" with their goofy ping-pong paddles. They can't even pretend to care because they're partial winners in all of this.

Is this the week where I finally actually complete my LinkedIn profile? Self-promotion feels so slimy but I do like it when my bank account tells me that I can have fun and not eat lentils and rice.

I'm almost done my final pollen stratigraphy. Added the charcoal and accumulation record to it and now rioja is struggling with adding two different types of plot together. I just want this project to be over...