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Maybe I’m just a piece of shit, but I’m really tired of seeing so much money being spent outside of Canada, and to try to put women to work regardless of their individual preferences. I think women should be able to work, don’t get me wrong. But my wife wants to be a stay at home mom. She can’t afford to be. A big contributor to this reality is that the doubling of the labor force has been an enormous factor in stagnating wages. We went from mothers being able to raise their kids, and families being able to be financially stable on a single income, to the state subsidizing daycare so someone else can raise your kid while you provide labor.

Another issue I have here is the concern about tuberculosis rates. This is a huge can of worms, but the reserve system doesn’t work. I understand why it exists. I think the goals are understandable. But you can’t choose to live separately from Canadian society and then complain that we don’t provide you with good enough homes and healthcare. We all trade cultural cohesion to be a part of Canadian society. In return, we get better access to important resources and technology.

If you want Canadian healthcare and good housing, assimilate, get a job, live in a reasonably sized population center, and you’ll have those things. You don’t have to live in Toronto or Vancouver, but you do need to participate in the system that creates that value in the first place. You can’t just stay on your reserve, spending all your money on alcohol and drugs, and expect necessities to be provided to you based on white guilt. And yes, this is what life is like on a lot of reserves. They live in horrendous conditions. That’s why TB is so prevalent.

I am empathetic to the fact that these people are born into a world that is not stacked to help them succeed. I don’t think we help them by trying to enable the existence of reserves. One of my close colleagues came from one of these reserves, and she always says the best decision she ever made was to come to a city, get educated, and start a career. The rest of her family are back on the reserve, and they’re all alcoholics. Whereas she lives in a small town, has a house and car, and still gets to celebrate her culture with other indigenous people who live here.

We provide the most benefit to the most people by consolidating resources, not by reinforcing the fantasy that we can live in tiny communities on the fringe of society and still get all the benefits of modern society. Live together, or suffer alone.

I’m always amazed at how rarely the “go to uni and get a good job” angle is brought up in relation to our failing foundational industries in the west. We’ve been incentivizing people to focus on “escaping” the working class, rather than trying to find ways to make those jobs more appealing.

I work in healthcare. Treating student practitioners badly is the norm in a ton of places in this field. 60 hour work weeks are normalized, and wanting a good work-life balance gets you ostracized.

The worst part is that I had to compete to get into this job that treats me badly. My program only takes the top 20 applicants out of hundreds per year. The schooling is brutal, with midterm or final exams 2-3 times a week. This is possible because you are blowing through courses consecutively rather than in a semesterized system. Once you get to practical placement, you are treated like the workplace bitch, and you’re expected to do 2-3x the work of a paid worker for free. Actually, you’re paying tuition to be there, so it’s even worse.

Don’t get me wrong, some of the brutality is necessary. The rapid pace of learning makes it hard to forget anything. It’s a great way to pack knowledge into the brain. But I would never recommend my program to anyone. It was a horrible experience overall. My job is pretty great minus the ridiculous hours, so I’m glad I went. But if I could go back and tell my younger self to do something else, I would.

Did you actually do your research on that “deworming drug”? It’s been used to treat a hell of a lot more than parasites. That is just its most common use.

This has always been funny to me as someone who actually works in healthcare and regularly reads scientific studies. Of all the things you could choose to hate Trump over, the example you give is one that plenty of people in the scientific community considered to be a treatment avenue worth researching.

Damn, the media propaganda machine is effective. Trump could run into a burning building to save a litter of puppies and they’d still find a way to make everyone hate the guy. It’s impressive.

They probably would have just called you names instead of openly engaging with your ideas. That’s the norm in my experience. I sometimes wonder why I bother posting at all.

Then again, I do get some traction, and some representation of ideas outside the common narratives is better than none. But it does seem like if you aren’t in lockstep with the popular narratives, you get a cascade of downvotes just for entertaining unpopular ideas.

People don’t want you to think for yourself. They just want you to parrot their beliefs back to them and give them affirmation.

Who isn’t fascist/racist in the eyes of the left? You can be a moderate libertarian with a couple of populist beliefs and they’ll throw those labels at you.

Shit, if all conservatives had that nice an ass I wouldn’t mind listening to their opinions.

We should be afraid of China. China is a superpower that doesn’t believe in our way of life. That doesn’t mean we should be afraid of Chinese Canadians, but we should still be wary. China is absolutely invested in swaying our political environment to their favor, and they’re willing to promote their interests by using migrants.

It’s an unfortunate reality that Chinese Canadians who are just going about their lives will see some collateral damage from our reactions to China’s meddling. We need to minimize this collateral as much as possible, but we are under genuine threat.

One thing we need to keep in mind is that Caucasian politicians can be bought just as easily, if not more so, as installing Chinese assets in our institutions.

Ah yes, I knew Demolition Man was an accurate prediction of the future. Thanks for confirming the direction we are headed in!

I’m so glad I have a career where I’ll never have to worry about crap like this. I’d love to see how the higher ups would like it if they had to be on camera the whole day with AI watching them for mistakes/phone usage.

I want politics to be less polarized too, but the train is off the tracks. The majority of people don’t believe in compromise anymore. They believe they are right, and everyone else are communists/nazis who must be destroyed.

I’m a healthcare professional who believes in trans rights. I also think hormone treatments and gender affirming surgery should be illegal to give to minors. The left will say I’m transphobic. The right will say I shouldn’t support these interventions at any age.

The reality is that both sides are blinded by ideology. The left has become just as intolerant and aggressive as the right used to be. They believe gender affirmation is more important than allowing a patient’s body to develop in a healthy way with natural hormone levels. They believe hormone blockers or replacement therapy given to young people have no lasting side effects. They seem to be under the impression that it isn’t abnormal to fast-track patients to gender affirming care rather than trying to reduce dysphoria through therapy. But if you bring this up, even as an educated professional, you’re an evil bigot conspiracy theorist who hates trans people.

You can’t find a middle ground with people like this. They aren’t open to discussion, and they certainly don’t care to understand where you’re coming from. It’s their way or the highway.

This is a semantic argument made to ignore the issue. The reality is that social media platforms effectively have become the “town square” where ideas are shared. Stifling legal speech in that environment is very effective censorship of ideas.

You can argue that corporations have that right because they own the network. I disagree. Curation of what can be said on their platform turns them into a publisher, not a communications provider. Any lawyer active in that space could tell you how insanely detrimental it would be for that distinction to be made, at least in the U.S.

Imagine your phone company deciding you can’t say certain words to other people using their service without facing dropped calls, suspensions of service, or being banned. All because your legal speech goes against the morality of the majority.

That’s essentially what social media does at the moment. They are legally defined as, and receive the benefits of, a communications service. But they are acting like a publisher, deciding what is and is not allowed to be said. It’s a serious problem.

Do you believe they should receive immediate massive military aid? Because we’re basically in a Mexican stand off with Russia and China right now. As soon as we pass a line for what intervention Russia is willing to tolerate, we will start a cascade of events that will lead to WW3, and possible nuclear war. Most of us don’t want to see the planet nuked into extinction over a small war on the other side of the planet.

Granted, I think war is inevitable. But that doesn’t mean we should rush into it. The bloodshed will get exponentially worse the minute this war becomes bigger than Russia v Ukraine, and we’re already very close to the tipping point in my estimation.

Why should a creator be responsible for the voiced opinions of their fans? That standard makes no sense no matter how you slice it. A creator’s job isn’t to police their audience, it’s to provide information/entertainment.

Just because he has the power to censor people you don’t like doesn’t mean he should, or that it’s a reasonable ask. Instead of passively alienating you by not acting, censoring those people would actively alienate them. He’s much better off letting individuals take responsibility for their own comments, rather than joining any given side’s thought-police.

As soon as you create the standard that you are responsible for what your fans say and do, you’ve lost. You can immediately be held accountable for the speech of the worst of them, and good luck regulating that.

We’re always finding ways to interact with the world and perceive it from a different dimension/angle. This comic isn’t so much inaccurate as it is exaggerated.

I’m pretty sure this is exactly how scientists felt the first time they developed microscopes, electron microscopes, and other technology that lets us experience the world in a different way. A mixture of “woah” and “mind-blown”.

I understand 90% of the science behind what I do as a medical diagnostic technologist. It’s still fucking magic as far as I’m concerned.

CTs and MRIs? Atom spin/relax releasing detectable energy waves that are somehow able to be read and aggregated by algorithms into a high detail image of the inside of a human body? Tell me that isn’t magic and I’ll call you a liar.

If they offer an invitation right now, then this is no longer a war between Ukraine and Russia, it will be a war between NATO and Russia. How do you think that ends?

WW3 may be the last world war. No one is eager to start it.

Sure, but how much cross-border support do activists on the left get? Hillary Clinton was just here speaking about left wing ideals of feminism, diversity, and inclusion. The dogma of the left, if you will.

This person hardly has an unbiased perspective. My personal belief is that people who use the term “far right” are suspect from the beginning. It’s not a real and definable group. It’s a dog whistle for left wing supporters that these people are “outsiders” who fall outside the liberal orthodoxy.

I fall center left on almost every issue. I am regularly called “far right” because I spend most of my time trying to explain and defend the mentalities of the right to the left. When you stop demonizing them and start talking to them, even someone like me can find a lot of common ground with the right. Common ground leads to compromise, and compromise leads to peaceful resolution.

The convoy is a perfect example of what happens when you pretend that we can ignore a large section of our citizens just because you don’t like what they believe. We tried to force vaccines on people by making employment conditional on them. Not a very liberal thing to do. We acted out of fear, and so did they. The convoy was about the fear of giving up bodily autonomy. How hard would it have been just to keep recommending them instead of forcing it on people? Do you think so many would have protested if we weren’t so heavy handed?

American influence, direct or indirect, is impossible to avoid in Canada. We are neighbors. Even the way I choose to type is American, otherwise I would have written “neighbours”. It’s inevitable. But that’s not an excuse to downplay the interests of either side. China’s interests are entirely different. The US government isn’t seeking to undermine us. China wants to destroy both the US and us. The Chinese are systematically trying to insert their citizens and paid operatives to erode Canada for their own gain, through economic means as well as by eroding national security.

The threat and nature of the two is entirely different. Comparing them is severely underestimating the intentions of China.

My problem with bubble zones is that they’re A) difficult to enforce, and B) protesting should be inconvenient. If we only allow protests in certain places, they’re extremely easy to ignore. This goes for any kind of protest on any issue.

In an ideal world, I don’t really want kids exposed to protests. But protests are only really effective when they take place where you don’t want them. If protests for trans rights only ever took place in a cordoned off area safely away from everyone, they wouldn’t be very effective either.

Parents should have a say what is being taught to their kids. LGBT values are an invasive culture change that is being pushed on kids without the interests of the parents in mind. This was equally true of the way Christianity was pushed on kids. I have always supported the secularization of schools. I don’t want the government teaching my kid what to believe. They should learn fact-based sciences and important life skills, values should be taught by the parents.

For the record, I’ve been an LGBT supporter all of my life. I’ve always preached acceptance of other people no matter their beliefs or circumstances. I’ve only recently had to start pushing back because I believe certain parts of the LGBT culture are not suitable for children. It does not make you evil or a bigot to seek compromise. We all have to live together in this nation, we need to find ways to make peace with each other.

Oh boy, this isn’t going to be a popular opinion. I’m a former therapist and I still work in healthcare. Part of why I left therapy is because I disagree with the prevalence of gender affirming care.

You’re allowed to disagree with me. I know it’s a contentious issue. But my experience is that our culture and institutions are using one label and one treatment as a panacea for a variety of issues where they are not appropriate. People with a variety of underlying mental health problems are being convinced into believing they have gender dysphoria, and they are funneled into that diagnosis and a type of treatment that is not as reversible as we pretend. Hormone therapy can be extremely detrimental to a developing body and mind, there are lots of studies out there to show this.

I think the core concepts behind the Trans acceptance movement are positive. I think people who can only find relief for their dysphoria through transitioning should be allowed to, and should be accepted and respected just as any other individual should be. As much as people hate Jordan Peterson, he has said these exact same things. I don’t see hatred in this stance. I see caution.

The anger you mistake for hatred is due to the concern of over-use of gender affirming care, not the existence of it. It absolutely should exist for those who don’t respond to other treatment methods. But I’ve seen a lot of patients come in assuming they are trans, desiring gender affirming care, when the reality is that you don’t have to be trans to hate yourself, hate your body, or feel an affinity for archetypes of the opposite gender. A lot of these people come in believing that transitioning will cure them of their disordered thoughts, but it is not a cure-all for all identity disorders or associated depression. Even if you do specifically have gender dysphoria, jumping to gender affirming care is radical. It’s not how we treat any other kind of disordered thinking, and largely stems from political interference into medicine rather than from science, in my opinion. There is no medical reason not to try more traditional forms of therapy and medications before pursuing the less understood and riskier treatments. We fast track this type of treatment now for ideological reasons regarding the sanctity of trans identity, not because it makes sense from the benefit/harm analysis used in every other aspect of medicine.

I very much wish the LGBT community could try to understand where moderates like myself are coming from. I have never treated a trans person with less respect than I would treat anyone else. I believe some people absolutely do not have any other viable options, and that transitioning can provide much needed relief for some. But I believe politics has overstepped into the realm of medicine in this case. At the very least, my hope is to protect children and teenagers from undergoing gender affirming care until it is absolutely clear and necessary that it is the only path of treatment. Not because trans people are evil, but because these treatments can do more harm than good if they aren’t absolutely necessary.