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So… You’re leaving then and going cold turkey?

There’s a lot of baggage with the term “woke” as it’s levelled here. In North America presently it is the brush that is used to tar anyone who is not white, “conventionally attractive”, skinny, cis, heterosexual or a narrow range of subtypes pandering to those audiences as a means to blanket criticize and apply pressure to remove them unilaterally from public. It’s such a politicized term used for years by an outright supremacist movement and levied as a dogwhistle in outright genocidal political spheres that it has no nuance. If you want to convey nuance it doesn’t work as a term.

Your views do not appear to strictly align with the movements who use “Woke Propaganda Cringe” as a tool of linguistically signaling this cluster of held beliefs in a space. It’s a bit like if you walked into a space where gangs are active and started throwing up specific gang signs. Where you come from those signs might have nuance and usage that is lighthearted and non serious or specific but in spaces where those gangs are active and enacting violence those signs are strict affiliation markers with implied buy in to violence and little allowance for misinterpretation.

If your intention is to not be deliberately incendiary towards the targets of the American far right when dealing with the people in North America it’s probably best to drop the usage of “woke”.

You are living during the time of masculine emancipation my friend. Men are allowed to be cute af these days and more and more women are catching on that this is a good thing. Some of the guys I know who register this way have found a lot of success dating in the non-binary scene where gender expectations are more generally negotiable. Non-binary circles are encircled with exterior connections of cis communities who have a more dynamic understanding of gender so if you are in a market to find likeminded souls that’s where I would look.

And also… Cute is sexy. It’s not everyone’s vibe but there’s definitely a desire out there for true gentlemen emphasis on the gentle. Most of the cis ones I know are married to ride or die partners whom exude an aura of sweetness out to 20ft.

It’s not Canada or Denmark which will suffer the most from-it, but US themselves

I get what you are saying but at the same time as a Canadian that comes across as more American-centric myopia.

We are a small country in terms of people with only nominally more people than the state of California spread out over a landmass 1.6% larger than the US. Our energy infrastructure doesn’t fully connect through our own country and due to American strong arming a lot of our manufacturing industry is not super robust. It’s the Goose next to the Eagle. We’re tough enough to defend ourselves and make it hurt to attack us but we aren’t getting anything out of this fight. For us it’s a fight for our lives not a fight we can profit off of. Whatever wounds we take in this fight will soften us up for the regular problems we fight. The forest fires that have become exponentially worse through climate change that have erased entire cities off our map. The healthcare crisis of a mass of retiring boomers needing more care in a system that has constantly under fire from Americanizing rhetoric that has caused disinvestment from an ethically better system. The protectionist rhetoric that comes with conflict which will erode the systems of government and create legal precedent for more autocratic means of operation that will need to be later undone. The pausing of reconciliation efforts with indigenous nations. This conflict, even as it is now, will cause real trackable losses of life and livelihood some of which will not come back.

Our existence and future as a sovereign nation is threatened but nope “The US will be the real victims of this”? Bloody fucking tonedeaf mate.

Yes, let’s make Washington state a Canadian providence.

Totally cool making WA a Province but leave providence out of it. Canadian politics are aggressively secular and we would prefer any divinities keep their noses out of our maple-y business.

I am less shocked and more resigned. Been tracking the progress of the Republican party over a decade now and watching them throw out euphemism after euphemism as they just aren’t needed anymore. What the reaction of shock got us back then was “alarmist” since the Conservative playbook was so layered up in dogwhistles the average person thought it was tinfoil hat fodder.

The base was being groomed to accept this as an outcome and so they were slow boiled. It was that way for the Nazis too. Each terrible move wasn’t quick it was the next horrible logical conclusion of their worldview of removing the “useless” aspects of humanity. They started first in government services and then with eugenics in mental health care while dismantling queer infrastructure in cities under the same eugenics line citing them as non-reproductive genetic dead ends. Then it turned to homelessness. Then as their policies created more “useless” classes of people in the form of minorities who could not legally work because of the laws they passed they turned to liquidation of those groups. Each step was followed by a pause to make the rhetoric more callus to build off the basic premise that as an able-bodied, regularly employed, sane, cishet, white, Christian / atheist that your resources were personally being stolen from you to feed the “undeserving”.

How far back can you remember Republicans on their soap box about people being undeserving of assistance or support? About people being a waste of resources or campaigning to make those people easier to stigmatize? It shouldn’t be surprising after over a decade that they’ve been dropping the mask.

They did a study and money can buy happiness but it caps out after the point it allows you chances to travel and take stress free time off. Being poor literally shortens people’s lives through misery.

So what we have is a man whom money will make as happy as he will ever get and remains miserable plunging people into a deficit of security through his actions. He’s infectiously miserable and someone needs to quarantine him.

Are you talking about the NATO shortfall? Because the Canadian government has a number of places where it is scrambling to find budget for a lot of things. Consider

• An expanded commitment to rehoming and financially supporting refugees from Ukraine. Processing and approving 962,612 submissions starting from 2022

• Reconciliation efforts with notoriously under served indigenous nations to improve dismal conditions of services support, locate and providing funding to document the Residential school genocide and providing better support to survivors.

• Reinvestment in one of the most challenging Public health care landscapes in the world due to the sheer landmass the government is constitutionally on the hook to cover.

• A history making sized population of people now reaching retirement age and requiring more drastic critical health interventions and social supports than ever before.

Static commitments like NATO spending are a bit like rent. If you are financially struggling through other financially challenging problems the landlord cannot often be convinced to give you a temporary forgiveness for extenuating circumstances. All of the above things are challenges that are either in service to international peace against the encroachment of Russia, the thing NATO was created to do, or they represent inflexible commitments the government has to serve the needs of it’s people as written into it’s own laws… But a NATO landlord has a contract with a number and the number doesn’t change no matter what.

These jabs are only vaguely in your direction. I have been aiming past you to people who are not shut down. You have decided to stay sidelined which I have said at multiple points, is fine. You do you. But what you keep doing is to try, quite transparently, to discredit the seriousness with which I am taking the situation by signaling to the people around me that inaction is noble. That what I am doing is shameful… That is my only problem with how you comport yourself because otherwise even those who are useless are fairly neutral.

But you aren’t useless, you are taking this personally. You are throwing up your hands and crowing victim which is another silencing tactic well worn in circles that aim to keep the conversation going so the solve never comes. That isn’t useless behavior , it is undermining tactics. This isn’t about you. Get over yourself.

At this point this convo is so buried that the point has essentially passed so I will not continue. Goodbye.

Get used to there being a front line because as this gets worse these mediums of communication are going to get more action driven. You think it’s overkill now but the more you get used to hearing other people calling for ACTUAL action the more you will see what it actually looks like and will know what you could be participating in. This is likely lost on you because at this point you are simply reacting to being checked.

Yesterday the US failed diplomatically at a fundemental level with allies who are key to policing the international waters and air between the USA and Russia. Don’t be fooled. It is not just a trade war, it is a softening of US defenses as well. Priorities will be changing and depending they could change faster than you expect. If this follows the patterns of other historical conflicts we will all only learn how critical our time was at this stage in hindsight.

No APATHY is calling a call for further action moreso than the feather touch of resistance “being an edgelord” it’s an attempt to shame someone into less vocal rhetoric so that people take what is happening less seriously. It’s an attempt to shame people out of mobilizing.

You want to stay out of the frontline? Fine. Move to the rear and stay out of the way of the people who are showing up People who are taking classes in collective action or medic training, showing up to protests and getting arrested or helping their neighbours with minor acts of institutional sabotage. You don’t get to shame on people taking this more seriously than you are.

We are so far beyond caring about toothless boycotts.

Well quite frankly nobody asked for this but we have it and we’re not the first fucking generation to have to put aome skin on the line to make the place we live habitable after everything goes to shit. If you think all you can do is wait to cash your ballot or wave a sign then I am speaking to you. It’s time to organize better and move because it is only going to get worse from here.

You are free to ignore this. You are free to go quietly. However keep your destructive apathy to yourself. More of us have to look apathy and personal disenfranchisement from the system in the eye and see it as the weight that stops any of this from ever getting better.

Your government design and allocation of power made it so one person could do this. Trump is simply the first to flaunt the social contract this brazenly. There was no lock on the door, only a verbal agreement not to go through it.

Once this is done, once Trump is deposed the fight will not be over. Measures must be enacted to make the systems safe so that another Trump can’t do this ever again. The system is just as liable for this happening as the man himself. We need to stop thinking in terms of singular bad actors and recognize faults in system design because otherwise it is just a waiting game for the next bad actor to do just as bad or worse.

It is your government. This is your head of state and the head of the US government weilding power that once belonged to Congress but ceeded to the executive branch about a hundred years ago. This man represents you.

I understand it is uncomfortable. That you wish it wasn’t so I get it… But Do not diminish this fact because these are the stakes. He is your, I repeat Your, Government. Do not wash your hands of him acting as he does because in your silence and denial he still acts on your behalf and you need so much more than silence and denial.

The anti-trans community does have a branch devoted to hating on trans men. It just looks different and has different targets. Trans hate in this direction is often quite patriarchal. It looks at trans men as a loss of a valued resource in the form of a reproductive object. It paints them as lost and confused little girls who were led astray by peers and the confusion of existing under patriarchal oppression into taking the easy way and becoming traitors to their category. Trans hate towards Trans men has largely the same hallmarks of homophobia and the social oppression that women will regret any non-natural change to their bodies or that they will regret not having babies. Trans men are framed as “a mistake”.

The second half of transmisandry is erasure focused on refusing to acknowledge some of the biological realities of Trans men. For example that for some trans men it is still possible to become pregnant or have periods. This second half props up the first half as it erases the fact that the social category of men do get pregnant and when they do resources are often riddled with stigma, services do not support them as frequently and they are treated as less valid a parent.

This is actually in part an issue of a misunderstanding of the dynamics of one of the situation law enforcement and people forced into dangerous circumstances face. Ever played that game where you have your hands out and a person puts their hands under yours and you have to withdraw your hands before you get slapped? It’s the same principle. Reaction is slower than action. When someone states they have a weapon and they reach for it you could be dead in about a second, maybe two if they pull it and instead fire at you. This means your “safe” reaction space is about a second to a half second long.

If you duck out of the way you get a person with a weapon who can choose to turn it on bystanders or retaliate by getting you into another situation where you have even less reaction space. While it is realized that cops, particularly US ones tend to escalate situations more quickly in part that is because in the US there’s a higher chance someone is packing heat and in part because of a culture of standing one’s ground. When we are talking about ACAB events a lot of the time those deaths occur in circumstances where the cops either should not have been there at all, escalated far too quickly or the death happened when the person was restrained and no longer an active threat. In Canada for instance improper use of force applies to everyone. If you had to be violent as a citizen, including as a cop then you are vulnerable to legal reprocussions unless your use of force was judged appropriate to mitigate damage to life. Not property, only life. If you exhaust every other de-escalating option only then you are cleared to use violence but the initiation of this reaction window is the point of no return. People who experience this window basically operate strictly on instinct and often are traumatized to some degree after the fact.

In this instance the officer’s life was at risk the moment the gun was indicated to be in the vehicle and the person in question stated they would use it. Could the entire traffic stop have been a series of inappropriate escalations on behalf of the officer, yes. Is there zero justification for an officer shooting this guy? No. We don’t know the first part, you would have to pick apart the senario starting from when he stopped the car. But if you end up in a situation where you have a gun trained on you and you escalate the situation further by saying you are reaching for a gun then basically this is effectively how you suicide.

As a Socialist that subscribes more to the historical strain of Saint Simone and Robert Owen that broke out and away early from Marxism to become the Chartist movement and the history of American non-Marxist socialism … I am often tired of how one note Tankies are. They seem obsessed with a sort of internal purity which denies a rich history of socialism other than Marx and Engles. Once one of them goes off about Stalinism or Maoism I basically just disengage because at that point they are basically so enamored with the aesthetics of communism that they aren’t going to be listening to anything. They want to be devout to the ideology while whitewashing the bloodstains of past failures. I understand a collectivist mindset is more or less what Marx aims to cultivate in his work but it seems often at the cost of tolerance of any level of apostasy.

The flattening of a mass of political thought into cardboard cuttouts to snipe at and sneering at the range of Socialism hybrids with No True Scotsman flavour condescension as political ideologies simply not complete worldviews in their own right has got me rather depressed in dealing with the average Communist on here. People in general often just seem to want to find something simple and easy to hate.