TimothyOilpants

It’s like anything… Think about how many people ride bicycles. Now go to ANY online community where people talk about cycling; it will likely be the most insufferably pedantic assholes you can imagine.

99% of people who buy video games don’t identify as “gamers”, they don’t read gaming media, and they certainly don’t interact with gaming discussion online.

As both an industry professional (former), and a self-identified gamer, I stopped giving a shit what “core gamers” had to say 10 years ago.

There are a multitude of social, legal, and economic policy changes that need to happen to make societies more resilient against this kind of culture war shit in the future. For extant populations the only way to de-radicalized them is with education, whether that’s voluntary or otherwise.

I’m certainly going to get down voted to oblivion, but the Chinese model is worth looking at. No civilization in human history has provided a higher standard of living to a larger population of individuals.

I like the idea of a true secular humanist end state, but as populations explode, I think we need a system that can function and deliver value at scale first; then we can gradually expand technological and ideological infrastructure for more direct democratic decision making.

It strikes me that finding ways to expand ideological freedom and democratic participation in the Chinese model would be orders of magnitude easier than scaling something like the Nordic model to more than a billion people.

Straight, cisgender white people are having a real hard time not being the loudest voices in the room anymore and it shows…

If observation of the US over the last decade has taught me anything, it’s that there are FAR more people who hold that type of hate in their heart than I ever cared to believe or imagine.

There is quite clearly a significant demographic of our population that has held these beliefs quietly for generations; they are just being emboldened to say things out loud now.

I don’t know what the solution is, but if we want to avoid the same descent into militarized white nationalism we are witnessing down south, we need to be ready and willing to act swiftly and decisively if these people seize control of our systems of power.

The planet

You don’t think critical infrastructure being on fire stifles businesses?

As a leftist that’s just me playing nice. I suspect you would find my ideal solutions… unpalatable.

Fair enough, we agree on the diagnosis of corporate capture and the narrow economic Overton window. But where you see a distinct difference between “corporate capture” and a “structurally codified duopoly,” I see the former actively manufacturing the latter as a defensive strategy.

The mechanism driving us toward a de facto duopoly isn’t just legal architecture; it’s the deliberate, psychological radicalization of the electorate into strategic voting over idealistic voting. When the corporate-backed center and right consistently weaponize the “lesser of two evils” narrative, they intentionally starve third parties of oxygen. By scaring the population into believing that a vote for anyone outside the top two is a wasted vote that guarantees the “worst-case scenario,” they effectively collapse a multi-party space into a two-party reality.

This psychological funneling has the exact same structural utility as a codified duopoly. Once the electorate is successfully housebroken into accepting that only two parties can ever realistically hold power, it facilitates resistance-free codification of the corporate agenda. If power only ever fluctuates between two predictable managers who both agree on the foundational tenets of neoliberalism, like the tax cuts and oligopoly protections we just talked about, then capital never faces a true existential threat.

You are completely right that fixing this requires labor power, tenant organization, and aggressive anti-monopoly policy rather than just electoral reform. But we can’t build that movement infrastructure effectively if the political imagination of the public is perpetually trapped in a strategic voting loop. The de facto duopoly is the fortress that protects the elite consensus, and breaking the psychological hold of strategic voting is the first step to tearing it down.

Your focus on seat counts and minority governments mistakes formal parliamentary diversity for actual ideological divergence on the economy. Having four or five parties in the House of Commons doesn’t mean we have economic diversity. If you look at actual policy outputs over the last forty years rather than just seat distributions, the structural drift toward corporate entrenchment and laissez-faire logic is undeniable.

Take the corporate tax trajectory as a prime example. Since the 1980s, corporate tax cuts have been a steady, multi-decade bipartisan project. The federal general corporate income tax rate sat around 36 percent in the early 80s, got slashed to 21 percent under Chrétien and Martin, and was cut down to 15 percent under Harper, which is exactly where the Trudeau Liberals have comfortably left it for the last decade. The structural tax burden has systematically shifted away from capital regardless of who is in power.

On top of that, Canada’s economy is defined by heavily consolidated, state-protected cartels in banking, telecoms, and grocery retail. The actual mechanics of our government, including the Competition Bureau, routinely greenlight massive anti-competitive mergers like Rogers and Shaw that further entrench corporate power. Third parties occasionally extract minor social concessions in minority scenarios, but they never fundamentally challenge this corporate architecture.

The evolution toward laissez-faire in Canada doesn’t look like an overnight elimination of the state anyway. It looks like the marketization of it. Look at the creation of the Canada Infrastructure Bank, which was explicitly designed to route public infrastructure projects through private finance so institutional investors can extract profit from public goods.

Dismissing any critique as just looking through a US lens ignores the highly specific flavor of Canadian corporate capture. Our hyper-financialized housing market, driven by federal tax structures that heavily favor Real Estate Investment Trusts, and our deep structural reliance on heavily subsidized resource extraction industries are uniquely Canadian economic realities.

A parliament can be as multi-party and fluid as it wants on paper. But if every configuration yields the same macroeconomic results of deregulation, corporate tax minimization, protected oligopolies, and the financialization of public assets, then the system is functionally operating primarily in the service of corporate interests.

Not directly related, but can we also seize Kevin O’Leary’s assets and fire him out of a cannon into the sun?

Without proportional representation we are moving closer to a structurally codified duopoly like the US with every election.

It doesn’t matter how our current electoral system is SUPPOSED to work; POSIWID.

That is a relatively common narrative, but it’s not factual.

The west most certainly did a great many things to damage and discredit the Soviet Union, but this was not among them. I’m not sure who you mean by “we”, but there is no credible evidence to support the claim that ANY foreign government had that level of intelligence on the RBMK reactor design prior to the international cleanup effort.

“…Canada’s English and French founding nations…” is a weird way to spell “genocidal colonizers”.

Nationalize telecom.

There is no situation where compelling a person to continue living against their will should be seen as acceptable.

Like… Is anyone going to try it first? I bet it’s 🔥

Why is anonymized clinical research data being held privately in the first place? The idea that we will let other entire civilizations suffer longer or worse, so that we can maintain an economic competitive edge is pure sociopathic insanity.

And ANYTHING to do with natural resource harvesting and processing.

It’s just about increasing the friction. No door lock will stop a motivated thief, but it will discourage 75% of people from trying. The laziest/stupidest kids (read: the most at risk for grooming and indoctrination) will be the ones least likely to overcome this friction, so it’s still a good harm reduction strategy.

To be fair, kids clever and motivated enough to get around this type of gating generally aren’t the ones at the greatest risk. I think this is more about creating a reasonable barrier to protect our most vulnerable.