for those interested

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there’s a pokémon in the path, so you can’t go past.

why don’t you just wake it up? you can’t, it’s sleeping and it can’t be woken. you need a special flute to wake it.

if I literally can’t wake it up even if I try, then why can’t I just like, go around it, or literally climb over it or something?

also, why can’t you just attack it? it’s sleeping. are we just being polite?

then you get the pokéflute and it wakes up, and it literally uses Rest in the battle to sleep again. and then you continue attacking it, even though it’s asleep. and then it wakes up in the battle, despite you not using a pokéflute to wake it again.

then after the battle, it faints. faints. if it faints, shouldn’t it just fall over and be in the path again? like, how is that so different from it being asleep, for my purposes?

wahhhhhh

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Hey there. If you’re somebody who often just tries to avoid Donald Trump because it all feels so miserable, I get you, but make an exception for this bizarre interview he just gave. This might be the most embarrassing, child-like meltdown I’ve ever heard him give, which for Trump is a high bar. (timestamp 37:22 til the end when he walks out)

It feels almost too tired to even bother saying, but... “imagine if Kamala ever gave a performance like this.”

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A few years ago at Pride in Toronto the only political party with any presence was the Liberal Party and they were giving out these buttons and I thought they looked really nice

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Without getting into the meaning or anything, just from a visual perspective, I think what’s appealing about the ‘progress’ flag is that it looks more like an actual flag, and it helps because the colours on the original flag people still use just don’t look that great together.

It looks right when you turn it vertically, too.

But conceptually, I like the simplicity of the original rainbow. It’s a spectrum, all visible light, so it represents the natural diversity of life, and ergo there’s no reason to add anything to it because it already implicitly includes everything.

I always felt like it could look better, though, if we took more artistic liberty with colours. I don’t know how it was originally made, but at some point everybody settled on a version that looks like they just clicked the default colours and hit send without tweaking it at all.

I’m not an art student fluent in colour theory nonsense, but here, I tried to make a rainbow flag that looks better to me:

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something that pisses me off is pills that taste bad. why? you can literally coat them in stuff. put them in a dissolving capsule like the gel pills. I don’t get it

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In smaller-population, countries, like Canada or Sweden or something, there can’t be hardcore environmentalism until there’s global cooperation on the issue. Even if we totally dismantled our economy and had zero emissions, it wouldn't make a significant difference. It would just disadvantage us and allow other countries to define our future.

This is an example of a collective action problem. If the entire world was on board, then I say shut down all oil and gas, no new pipelines, nothing. I’m on board, because then we could actually accomplish this and literally save the planet. But currently, the world is fucking crazy and half the largest economies are governed by 70-year-old climate change deniers. Even if Canada reverted to medieval farming and had zero emissions, this place is fucked until that changes.

The realistic path to a green economy, and a future with less horrible foreign policy driven by oil dependence, is investing in that future, of course, but it’s most likely also expanding our domestic oil and gas sector in the meantime. The economic and political benefit is simply too much to ignore.

And the political reality, too: I wrote the above as though I’m an all-powerful government that can approach the issue rationally, but if you don’t manage the economy well enough, voters will reject you and vote in the same right-wing climate change deniers I mentioned, and they’re strip away environmental protections even harder, probably without even investing in the future. So then you lose either way.

This is the reasoning for why, even though I’ve said climate change is probably the single most important issue humanity faces, I’m in favour of the Canadian government expanding our oil and gas sector, reducing carbon taxes, or scaling back our goals for reducing emissions, to whatever degree they deem is appropriate as part of a broad economic agenda. The only thing we shouldn’t touch is whatever is required of us by any international agreement that other large industrial economies are also following.

I’m not happy about it but that’s how it is.

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When I was younger, I couldn’t have explained why I didn’t like the Simpsons. I just didn’t. It had funny jokes sometimes, which was easy to acknowledge if you showed me scenes from it out of context, but whenever I just sat and watched the show, I actively disliked it and after some point started avoiding it.

Revisiting some of it as an adult, it’s much easier to articulate. The Simpsons is horrible and depressing. It’s a mirror world, a parody of ours, where everything and everybody sucks. It’s one of the most misanthropic articles of American culture.

It’s about Homer, who’s just some random idiot, who in the beginning is at least sort of a well-meaning person, but as the show goes on even that becomes questionable. His family is stupid and dysfunctional, which is probably largely his fault considering he’s a physically abusive alcoholic father. Despite their house being weirdly large, it’s intended to be low quality and the family constantly on the brink financially, despite Homer giving up on all his dreams to work a job he hates trying to maintain stability.

Speaking of which, his job sucks. He doesn’t like it, he’s not remotely competent at it. His boss mistreats everybody and is a criminal if not downright evil. The police are all stupid incompetents, the town is run by a horribly corrupt and cynical mayor who gets reëlected anyway because everyone in the town is stupid.

There’s a priest character who’s dry, petty, and burned out, basically just showing up and doing his job as a 9 to 5 without caring. The only person in the show with a positive disposition at all is their neighbour, Ned, whom Homer despises and whose positivity is just something to make fun of. as the writers destroy his life and take everything from him for laughs.

Homer spends his free time at a bar run by a depressed, suicidal incel who’s jealous of his wife, alongside his stupid alcoholic friends, one of whom has completely destroyed his life drinking and whom the show gives no relief or redemption (the punchline is “haha, this guy used to be happy and functional, but now he’s a miserable fat alcoholic!” and that’s it).

The children’s television is all mindless crap, orchestrated by Krusty, who’s a cynical, drug-addicted criminal who shamelessly does whatever gets him paid.

I also really dislike their portrayal of the elderly. Every older person in the show is portrayed horribly. It’s like they’re all dementia patients who sit around doing nothing and having no value to society whatsoever. It feels downright hateful, like everybody in the writing room had a bad relationship with their grandparents.

Maybe if you have nostalgia-goggles because you saw this show on TV when you were a kid like I did, you got so used to how horrible its world was that after some point you don’t even feel it anymore. Stop me before I start thinking about how much the Simpsons alone may have contributed to a generation of 30-to-50 year-olds growing up to be jaded, cynical, ungrateful, pessimistic burn-outs.

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For Canadians who don’t know how their government work:

In each riding throughout the country, we vote in somebody to elect us in the House of Commons, serving as members of Parliament (MPs). The party with the most seats in the House becomes the governing party, meaning they control the Canadian Ministry, our executive branch. The leader of the governing party becomes Prime Minister (PM), meaning, among other things, that it’s up to them to appoint MPs to serve as ministers, hence the name Ministry. The collection of ministers is also called the Cabinet.

The ministers are leaders or directors of various government departments and agencies, which comprise the Public Service (formerly, and still colloquially, the Civil Service). For example, Mélanie Joly, MP for Ahuntsic-Cartierville, QC, is currently our Minister of Industry. However, there isn’t simply a corresponding department of industry (we have many more departments than ministers). As minister of industry, Joly works with the Office of Consumer Affairs, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, the Canadian Space Agency, and numerous others. The exact titles held by ministers is regularly in flux to describe their areas of focus, and they’re not always short. The current Cabinet can be seen on the official website for the Prime Minister’s Office: https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/cabinet

The Canadian Senate and the Supreme Court of Canada both also exist and they sometimes do things, but they’re not in the news as much, and not as powerful as their American counterparts. I don’t think the average Canadian knows the name of a single member of either body. The Senate, like the King, theoretically has a lot of power, but very rarely contradicts the House of Commons. They mostly review legislation and make minor corrections or revisions. Like the House of Lords in the UK, its members are appointed, not elected. By whom? The Crown, but on advice of the Prime Minister and via their Governor General — which means, in effect, they’re simply appointed by the Prime Minister. Of the 105 current members, 81 were appointed on advice of Justin Trudeau, due to his long tenure as Prime Minister.

The Governor General is basically just an intermediate functionary. After an election that changes the tides in the House of Commons, it’s the Governor General who appoints the Prime Minister. When the Prime Minister wants to appoint people to his or her Cabinet, or appoint new members to the Senate, or appoint members to the Supreme Court of Canada, it’s formally not the PM doing these things directly, but the Governor General who does it on advice of the PM. This separation is a customary artefact of Canadian history, where the Governor General represents the Crown, theoretically holding great power but never exercising it.

I’ve talked to a lot of Canadians who didn’t know what the “Canadian Ministry” referred to, who didn’t know the Cabinet had to be MPs (in the U.S., the Cabinet can just be any random person the President appoints), or other miscellaneous things like this. I have tried to start bringing it up more.

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I remember when I was 12, my parents bought younger sister a particularly huge amount of toys she wanted one Christmas, and then sat around opening them all with her on Christmas morning. It was very exciting and middle-class wholesome. Then we had coffee on the patio and went out to get something from the other house and when we came back, instead of playing with any of the toys she just opened, she was sitting around playing with a little box of pennies she already had before Christmas. This is my favourite childhood memory.

[irisembury]

I made a video talking about our relationship with left-wing extremists, and looking over some of the history they often talk about to demonstrate how little they care about your values.

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Story: Indigenous Actress (Q’orianka Kilcher) Sues James Cameron for Using Her Face in Avatar (2009) Without Permission

This is a very weird lawsuit because it’s not even an AI story. It’s literally just that back when they were making this movie 20 years ago, they looked at various women as inspiration for designing this animated character, and one of them was this girl, who somehow found out years later. Now she’s suing, calling this exploitation and theft, not only of her face but her biological identity and cultural heritage.

Is this really where we are? To be inspired by something while drawing your character is exploitation and theft?

They also appear to claim that if someone is inspired by your appearance, then draws a cartoon, then later has that cartoon do anything sexual, that’s actually the same as deepfake pornography.

Wow, did you guys know that when the Na’vi did that hair-connection thing in the first movie, you were watching child porn? Neither did I.

I don’t have a finger to the pulse of the American legal world, so I can’t tell if this is just going to be laughed out of court or not. I’m having trouble imagining the potential consequences of a suit like this actually winning.

[irisembury]

If you exported all of Trump’s rhetoric and positions and such it would be unpopular in Canada, so when I say there is a rising MAGA-esque sentiment on the right in Canada, it’s more about people embracing the same style of choose-your-own-reality conspiracy theorism like this:

[irisembury]

In Canadian political discourse, it’s become somewhat common for the right wing to say the LPC and CPC are near-evenly matched, citing charts kind of like this one, which show first-choice preference as about even for most age groups.

The part they don’t explain (not that it’s well hidden—they just hope you don’t think about it) is that what this shows is a strong and consistent preference for the Liberals over the Conservatives, because the vast majority of people who vote for our smaller parties (the NDP, Green, and Bloc) would vote LPC if it were a vote just between those two parties. (The purple one, the PPC, is the only other right-wing party.) The Bloc isn’t always more left than right, so it depends, and I’m not saying we can count all third-part voters as would-be Liberal votes. But if Canada held a big referendum that was simply Liberal Party versus Conservative Party, the result would, by all indication, be a Liberal landslide. And this has been the cast for decades now. The Conservative Party only stands any chance at all because they consolidated the right vote, and our system still rewards being the largest plurality.

This is the hard problem of the Conservative Party of Canada: when you get down to it, they just aren’t a good reflection of Canada. They don’t represent Canadians. They just don’t, the same way the NDP or PPC don’t. The majority of Canadians, the average in Canada, want something to the left of the Conservatives. And you’re not going to solve that with memes. You can’t just sit there waiting for the Liberals to screw up and then say ‘eh? how about us?’ and expect to gain any long-term support from that. It gives you a boost every now and then, but the underlying issue is that people fundamentally don’t like what you stand for. To change this, you have to change the party. That’s why so many people have been saying the Conservatives should move on from Poilievre: not because he isn’t popular with Conservative voters (he is), but because he’s somebody who’s dug in to his own way of being, he doesn’t like to change course, he never changes his mind about anything, he says so himself.

I want our country to have a healthy opposition party that challenges and criticizes the government and provides and alternate vision or policy agenda that we could adopt if the people decide our current path is no longer working. I wish we had a Conservative Party that was more honourable and unifying, that I could actually trust in leadership as an alternative if the Liberals ever fell astray. I don’t feel that way currently with Poilievre at the helm. The vulgar, dishonest, and deeply personal ways that he attacked Trudeau (calling him a radical extremist and narcissist, a Marxist, and an extremist wacko) was unbecoming of national leadership. And the way he goes on about wanting to fight ‘wokeness’ in our institutions feels like something that simply doesn’t belong in our political culture. There are better Conservatives than him. And I fear his leadership within the Conservative Party is part of what led its other members to be so abrasive and averse to speaking to the substance of what they’re talking about at any given time.

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The government of Canada has announced we’re going to develop a general sovereign wealth fund. A sovereign wealth fund just means a bunch of financial assets or investments owned by the government itself. A lot of people think they’re a good idea to encourage the public feeling invested in the broad economic success of the country, and they can be used strategically by governments in various ways. And as soon as our PM, Mr. Carney, made this announcement, the opposition converged on a simple talking point: Canada has debt, therefore this isn’t a real sovereign wealth fund, because a real sovereign wealth fund requires wealth, not debt. Norway has a sovereign wealth fund because they’re a net surplus nation. Canada runs a deficit, therefore we can’t have a sovereign wealth fund.

Why is this so? Why can’t a country both hold debt and hold investments at the same time? I have no idea. And unfortunately, none of the people making this retort made any effort to explain or elaborate. I’ve heard people talk about wanting a sovereign wealth fund in Canada before, and people wanting one in the U.S. as well (which it supposedly committed to doing earlier this year). And I don’t remember anyone saying a requirement to have a sovereign wealth fund was we had to solve our debt and become a net surplus nation first. That seems like something everybody “decided” in response to Carney’s announcement. And to be sure, a government holding certain funds it manages in this way is not that uncommon, not even a totally new thing for Canada, and certainly not limited to surplus nations. The opposition’s talking point is made up, shallow, contrived, meant only to offer the appearance of a rebuttal for people who will pay attention to the news for no more than a few seconds.

The only real question was where the money to spend on making the investment was going to come from. And obviously for Canada, since we don’t have a bunch of government-owned oil companies to draw revenue from (like Saudi Arabia, say), the principal is going to be either taxation, borrowing, or both — the same way we pay for literally everything. If the government expands healthcare, or builds a pipeline, or increases our military spending, that’s all paid for with taxes or borrowing. And the government gave us its answer: they planned on borrowing money for seed funds, because Canada is considered a very safe debtor internationally, so we can borrow at very low rates. Then part of what we’re going to do with that money is invest broadly in our own national infrastructure and energy economy, since we’re also planning on expanding in those areas. So it will be a strategic tool for the country and only grow more effective over time. The one component of it that sounded unusual — which isn’t to say bad, necessarily, but unusual — is their plan to let anybody invest in the fund, meaning if you throw your money in, you’ll get a share of the returns for that money, like any other investment.

After the government announced it was going to be seeded with borrowed money, the opposition talking point became comparing it with a credit card. The whole plan was compared with a person being in credit card debt, and then taking out even more credit card debt to invest in the stock market. The opposition leader, Mr. Poilievre, called it the credit card budget, and said Liberals are just putting “more bills on the national credit card.” What makes this appealing rhetoric is that normal people view credit card debt as bad, but the reason credit card debt is bad is that it’s given to you at such high rates. It’s not inherently bad to hold any debt at all. It’s possible to hold too much of it, and for it to become a problem, but within some limit debt is good. It lets you spend future money before you could access it otherwise. That’s why people borrow money. It’s why every successful person has debt, it’s why every big company has debt, it’s why most countries have debt. The idea that debt is bad because credit card debt is bad is a supreme act of oversimplification.

The pitch by the Canadian government is that this is an unusual time for Canada. We’re in a very difficult spot financially, mostly but not entirely due to U.S. tariffs disrupting our trade relations. And we’re in desperate need of investment and expansion. Now is a reasonable time to seek immediate relief in the form of borrowed money, because we have impeccable access to cheap credit, and our country has a bright future and will be able to pay it off. And in Mr. Carney, we have leadership with the exact sort of expertise one would want at a time like this. If the opposition wants to convince us we’re on the wrong path, they’re going to need to do better than simplistic, kneejerk analogies and actually grapple with the substance of what the Liberals have put forward.

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Two fun facts about Nazis.

First, the Nazis never used the term ‘Nazi’. There was no Nazi Party or Nazi Germany, officially. They called the party the Nationalsozialistische such and such. It was common in German at the time to abbreviate things by taking the first syllables of things and adding an ‘i’, thus a social democrat might be called a sozi (in German, it was ‘sozialdemokrat’). An advocate of Nationalsocialism might then be called a nati, but they used ‘Nazi’ because it looked more like ‘sozi’, already a more established term, and because ‘Nazi’, by happy coincidence, had another meaning: a folk name for a clumsy moron. It was short for Ignatz, a German given name that doesn’t have a common English equivalent, though if you’ve seen The Princess Bridge you should remember a character named Inigo (the “you killed my father, prepare to die” guy), which is its Spanish form. It became a stereotypical name in some parts of Germany for a peasant and was therefore made fun of through jokes and plays. An American equivalent might be calling somebody ‘Jimbob’ or some other stereotypical ‘redneck’ name. Imagine if there was a new fascist political party in the U.S. and their abbreviation was the JMBOB Party or something, so we all started calling their followers Jimbobs, because that sort of works and is also funny.

Second, the Nazis didn’t use the term ‘swastika’, or at least that’s not usually what they called it. Hitler and most Nazis called it a Hakenkreuz, Germany for a hooked cross, because that’s what it was, and they preferred using the German name to emphasize its Germanness, since they presented it as an ancient Aryan symbol taken from their own history. But right around this same time period, the world was also learning about Sanskrit stuff over in India, and translating everything into English, and when we English-speakers saw the symbol the Nazis were using, we said “oh hey, look, a swastika”, because that was a symbol we learned about recently from the Buddhists and stuff. And calling it by that word felt all sophisticated or academic, like we were using its proper, historical name instead of just calling it a ‘hooked cross’ like the cabbage barbarians were. In Germany today, German speakers typically distinguish between the Hakenkreuz, meaning the Nazi symbol that you're not allowed to use for your organization because Nazi stuff is all illegal there, and swastika, which is used as a more neutral, academic term for the same symbol as it appears in other contexts, like actual ancient European symbolism or as it’s used in Eastern religions.

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This was the German parliament after the election in 1930:

How do we interpret these results? Well, the dark red on the far left is the Communist Party of Germany, the KDP. The brown on the far right is the Nazi Party, the NSDAP (formally, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party). The other parties were of diverse opinions, but most of them found unity in a simple platform: democracy is good, and extremist groups (Communists and Nazis) who want to dismantle democracy are bad.

From the German republic’s founding in 1918 until the elections in 1932 (the elections immediately after this one), there was a coalition government formed by numerous parties, always including at least the Social Democratic Party and the Centre Party, as well as other smaller parties. (The German National People’s Party, the main right-wing party before the Nazis came along, was the largest other party not part of the coalition.)

It wasn’t until the election after this one that everything changed. The Great Depression severely affected Germany, more so than any country outside the U.S. and the UK. The parliament was in a period of disagreement and gridlock. Meanwhile, the Nazi propaganda machine was now working in full force, pushing the narrative that the Germany government, especially the the Jews, had sold out the German people through the Treaty of Versailles, and that’s the real reason everything was going so badly. The goal was hatred and blame for the current establishment, and to inspire belief in an unseen conspiracy of traitors that needed to be rooted out.

There was also a very real fear of Communism coming to Germany. Germans knew about the Russian Revolution, they knew the Soviet Union was meddling in their politics, and the German Communist leader was even an admirer of Stalin, the Russian dictator, and wanted to bring that style of rule to Germany. The Nazis positioned theirselves as the only force that could put a stop to this and stand up to the Red menace. This was a major factor in driving moderates to their side, choosing them as the lesser of two evils in a battle to come.

The desperation, mass unemployment, poverty, hunger, violence in the streets, and fear of takeover by foreign powers all led to an environment in which a majority of Germans who voted opted for a party that wanted to flip the table on the republic in one way or another. Whether they voted for the Nazis or the Communists, they voted for something other than this. And while this didn’t result in a Nazi government, it gave the Nazi Party a minor position with enough influence and leverage that another year later, they were able to seize control of government by force through widespread voter suppression to control the election results.

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