I support decoupling as quickly as possible

Me too, we just differ on how quickly that can happen without driving average people into the arms of fascists.

30% of our population would be glad to see it, and 30% is all it took in the US this past election.

What are you even talking about? Engagement in local politics and mutual aid is at historic lows, in large part due to the influence of US central social media corporations.

Why do you think the only two options here are your narrow ideas or nothing at all?

To be clear: the approach you’ve outlined is incompatible with anti-fascism. Therefore you can’t claim that moral high horse. Your approach is fundamentally flawed in that it’s still dogmatically invested in capitalistic top-down power consolidation.

Please, dear god. Get off the internet and sign up to help your local mutual aid organizations. We can do so so so much more to combat fascism by reminding each other of our collective strength, compassion, and humanity. That really is the antidote to fascism, and we all need to be working toward that more than anything our federal government can do via tarrifs or trade bans.

There are effective ways to fight fascism.

These are based on showing people there is a better way, and in particular showing average people that the left is working for them.

And then there are ways that directly embolden fascism by senselessly cratering the lives of everyday people thereby driving the masses directly into the arms of the far right.

You can’t just disentangle overnight, unfortunately. And I’m sorry but if you don’t think backlash is something that can/should be mitigated by an effective strategy then you haven’t been paying attention.

A far more effective antidote to fascism is mutual aid.

That’s all well and good until the electorate revolts by putting the CPC in charge next cycle. No thank you, if only for the fact it’s politically incompatible with anti-fascism. You can’t make such broad moves and expect there won’t be backlash. Canadians are NOT immune to the same thing happening up here that’s happening south of the border.

This is why I say it’s not the American people who are to blame. I wish more people understood this. Canadian society isn’t immune from the exact same thing coming up here, especially if the CPC wins and sells us out to the US. Lord knows too many of our population is culturally indoctrinated by US social media platforms.

70% of the US population DID NOT vote for Trump—they were either disillusioned with democracy (abstained) or voted for the least-bad option (Kamala). And of the remaining 30%, many of them don’t necessarily like Trump so much as they were duped enough into thinking he was less bad than the alternative.

Real talk: is there such a thing as a non-tariff response to what the US is doing that doesn’t amount to, essentially, rolling over while the US to curb stomps us? What’s the alternative? Because 70% seems low.

Clearly, you do. And they’ve convinced you to blame your neighbor for the boot on your neck.

Right? I feel like this is so obviously not about sex & my life is a clear example to that.

For context, I’m a trans woman who works in tech.

Five and a half years ago I was miserable as hell from relying on external validation. I’d never been happy with my birth sex, but I’d stuck it out for years, duct-taping my happiness together with academic or career achievements, working myself to the bone just to achieve some degree of stability at the cost of my mental health, relationships, happiness, sex life, etc.

For all intents and purposes, I was treated by society as male during that era of my life… albeit of the gay sort of feminine and very depressed variety. I also had a laundry list of accomplishments each year and could not fathom being happy with myself unless I collected them all like pokemon.

Sex changes are like the world’s most opposite thing to external validation. I went from being a white cis male to… well look at what society thinks of trans women. There have been many many times in the past half-decade in which I felt like I’d jumped off a cliff, that I might lose my career, that I’d struggle harder to get ahead, that I wouldn’t be taken seriously anymore.

And some of that was true—I definitely deal with misogyny and transphobia now in a way I never would’ve before. I do feel I have to perform 2x better than before in order to achieve the same sorts of recognition… and I have to now for some reason look good doing it (whereas before I could basically ignore my body, wallow in dysphoria/depression, and still be given credit).

But… what have I done career-wise during the past 5 years? I’ve flatlined. Honestly? I “met expectations” for a half-decade straight. No awards, no accolades, just “did that thing and went home.” I was too busy both emotionally and practically with a whole freaking sex change outside of work. And nobody has come to eat me, even though at this phase of my life most coworkers don’t even know I was once male. Heck, if anything, I look at a lot of my cis female peers and they’re having kids which (unfortunately/unfairly) amounts to practically the same thing.

Before my sex change this would have been unthinkable to me. My entire happiness and sense of identity was pinned to my career. And that was was literally THE duct tape on the joke that was my life. The thing I only way I could manage to keep myself male. Literally the biggest lesson career-wise that my sex change has taught me is that it’s okay to have eras in your life where your career just vibes for a bit while you short your shit out.

So… I just don’t think this is a male vs. female thing. It’s a running away from oneself and trying to cope with your misery via external validation thing. It IS true that when you’re read as female you DO have to push ahead. Chances are, similar to how I felt I had to alienate myself for my career in order to get to a place where I could afford a sex change, this woman felt she had to do the same in order to establish herself as a woman in tech. The barrier to entry is higher.

But once you’re there and established it’s like, girl you can chill now, it’s gonna be fine if you’re fine, maybe with a bit more stability and a bit less pay.

I always found it funny in the mid-2010s when the central bank was struggling to meet inflation targets why nobody seemed to suggest UBI could help fix that… seems to me that giving people money directly is at least as stimulating to the economy as dropping interest rates. Difference is one benefits capitalists, while the other benefits the working class…

In my opinion, this is an issue that can be avoided by implementing UBI gradually.

Shortages and inflation don’t just arise from people having more disposable income. If that were true, inflation would’ve been worse and supply chains would be facing shortages decades ago when everyone had more disposable income in real terms.

Rather, these issues are more a function of three factors:

• Rate of change in demand
• Price collusion among large companies
• Supply chain disruptions

During COVID, we saw all of the above, for example. Supply chains disrupted, people had more disposable income due to CERB and changed their consumption behaviours dramatically during lockdowns/work from home (rapid shift in demand), while large corporations such as Loblaw’s & Sobey’s engaged in well publicized price-fixing schemes.

This lead to the inflation crisis we are just now recovering from.

However, there’s no inherent reason why UBI needs to include any of these things. You could instead, for example:

• “Boil the frog” when it comes to demand, by starting with small payments and phasing them in so that consumption habits do not change too rapidly
• Promote anti-trust measures against large companies to prevent price fixing (bonus: proceeds can go toward UBI)
• Similar to point one, if you take the boil the frog approach it will be less disruptive to supply chains, as people leave jobs gradually & companies are slowly incentivized to pay their employees more in order to stay competitive

At the end of the day I don’t see it as all that different from setting interest rates, for example. Like YES the central bank COULD tank our economy by raising the interest rate 2000 basis points tomorrow. And YES they COULD also drive inflation through the roof by setting the interest rate to 0% as well. But they ain’t gonna, because it’d cause… inflation/deflation and supply chain shortages.

If you think democracy is to blame here, you need to educate yourself about how things work down there. Capitalists have bought and paid their way through elections playing both parties for decades & pumping out propaganda from the media networks they own.

There is no party for the working class in the US. Voters largely did NOT vote for Trump. They voted to abstain or held their nose and voted for the least-bad option. And of those who did vote for Trump they did so in protest & a lack of better options. That’s why Trump is in office, and the oligarchs are just playing you into believing otherwise lest the working class realizes we outnumber them.

Blaming common folk for the exploits of billionaires is exactly what your owners want you to be doing. Your anger and outrage is important and valuable, but you need to wake up and place the blame where it belongs.

Start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

As someone in a high income bracket, I’d gladly pay more in taxes in exchange for a low-overhead direct equalization program such as UBI.

Something that’s always bothered me about these discussions, however, is how it always seems to be treated as a binary choice. As if they only two options are to do nothing or flip on the UBI lightswitch. But this is IMHO stupid given the way economies work. Something like UBI would take 3-5 years to fully influence the economy, and anyway, economies tend to do better with stable long-term changes rather than sudden shocks.

So, if it were me, I’d instead implement a UBI program like so:

• Create a crown corporation similar to the Bank of Canada
• Mandate the crown corporation to set UBI rates with an eye out for the health of the economy and the population
• The UBI rate would imply a rate of taxation as well as set forth monthly payments to every Canadian citizen after deducting some (externally audited) operating budget (which should be relatively low given the program will never be means-tested)
• Begin UBI with some small-value sum such as $50/mo per person—enough to look nice hitting people’s accounts, enough to make a real difference to the poorest of the poor, but not enough to realistically cause economic problems
• Let the Crown corp adjust the UBI rate yearly and have collection handled by the CRA at tax/paycheck time

In my opinion, if the government did something like this, we’d have a long-lasting program that is agile enough to adapt to economic conditions or things breaking along the way. There is likely a sweet spot for UBI similar to that of an interest rate, and we’d be able to find where that line is empirically, without having to risk serious shocks to the economy, inflation due to supply chain shocks, etc.

I would expect such a program would gradually increase over the span of 10-30 years until basic needs like food and shelter are covered for everybody, but luxuries and “comfortable” lifestyles remain out of reach for those who are out of work. But, if I am wrong, it wouldn’t matter anyway… the UBI rate would just wind up settling higher or lower according to the needs of society.

This is one of the best initiatives I’ve seen from a government in a long-ass time. Such a railway would be a boon for our economy. As a Montrealer, the only thing I can say is I’m pissed it didn’t already happen three decades ago.

$80 bn is chump change for something this critical. It will in the long run pay for itself via increased productivity and other benefits to our Canadian economy.

This is a class war, don’t get it twisted. The working class in the US are a bulwark against that shit coming here.

By all means, fuck the Cheeto & large American corpos. But working class is working class. Don’t be selling us out to Loblaws just because you decided some farmer in Minnesota is to blame for the broken system they have down there.

Yeah, no. Ban the tags. Thank you.

I mean the other half of this is that working class people could take over the NDP leadership if there were more momentum but instead it’s just kind of withering with people buying into far right bs

I’m a millennial trans woman who sometimes fucks cishet Gen Z men I feel that’s pretty much spot on in my observation

There’s basically two generations of Gen Z: those who were adults pre-pandemic and take after millennials & those who were not.

The ones who came of age in the pandemic have a lot more hangups about social interaction, have consumed a lot more misinformation, and generally have baggage about being criticized for their (admittedly shitty and ignorant) views they’ve clearly been fed by the algorithm and their friends

These guys ARE NOT bad people but they caught serious brain rot during the pandemic and it’s gonna take time/empathy for them to fully recover. It does not help that there’s a certain type of moral superiority to millennial activism that they clearly are reacting to

It’s clear that PP is starting to go down the drain I think given all this recent polling. Idk wtf is going on with the NDP

H1-B visas. They keep working there because they don’t want to leave the US. Often they have entire lives and family in the US and have not simply been there for a few short years.