He won’t actually, like, listen to them. But he’ll be in the room when they’re happening. Sometimes. If he didn’t decide to play golf instead.

Also I really think the key thing to pay attention to here is “multiyear period”. As in, it takes years for companies to reconstruct their entire production and supply chain. Imposing harsh tariffs on goods made outside the US could theoretically boost domestic production, but only if there’s actually the skills and infrastructure available domestically to make that cost-effective… And even then, the gains would take years to decades to realise. And Trump sure as shit isn’t making the kinds of education and infrastructure investments needed to actually make any of that worthwhile.

First thing that comes to mind is Warframe. It’s a co-op third person looter-shooter, with full crossplay, so you can all party up across your platforms. It’s all very controller friendly, with lots of shotguns, SMGs, melee weapons and space magic that are all really forgiving of imprecise aim. It cares less about twitch reflexes and more about movement.

The scifi setting and “space ninja” aesthetic may or may not be to your taste, although I promise if you take the time really sink into the world it’s actually one of the most refreshingly different and unique scifi settings out there. There’s a lot of weirdness, but as you dig deeper into the story that weirdness all makes sense. And, like, it’s the good kind of weird if you get me? Stuff that makes you go “Holy fuck I want to know what the deal with that is!”

It does have a lot of MMO elements, so it can get grindy at times, but in my experience it’s a really solid game for hanging out and chilling on Discord together. Plus the game itself is free, with no paid DLC or add-ons, and for an adult with an income a few bucks here and there skips a LOT of grind, especially if you check out the third party market website where players will sell you a lot of the rare drops you’ll want for less than a dollar.

Added bonus, it’s made by the original developers of Unreal Tournament, Digital Extremes (there are actually a bunch of UT references squirelled away in the game).

Easily one of the most braindead takes I’ve seen.

“Oh but he didn’t mention voter fraud.”

Yeah, because he won. There’s no value in questioning the ref’s call when it’s in your favour.

Crypto is a revolutionary product because it enables users to possess their own units of account.

By this reasoning, so is Monopoly money.

I think my next step is going to be to sign up for NDP membership, so that I can use my voting power to push that party into a more explicitly progressive direction.

That and, as you said, getting involved in local advocacy and education. That part is going to be trickier since I just moved to a new province so I’m basically starting from scratch.

The war on drugs only failed if you truly believe its goal was getting rid of drugs.

To quote John Erlichman, one of its architects:

“The Nixon Campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar Left, and Black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

By the strandards of what it was created to do, the war on drugs was fantastically successful.

The war on porn will be successful in exactly the same way, because Republicans have already spent decades redefining all LGBTQ content as “pornographic”. This is will be a tool for disrupting queer and trans communities, for erasing queer and trans resources and tearing down queer and trans rights activists. Stopping porn isn’t the point, and it never was.

And to be clear, this isn’t supposition, it’s already literally happening in Florida.

Florida is the model for what they want to do everywhere.

Two years.

No, they didn’t. And when you tell yourself that, you make yourself a sucker.

Because when we tell ourselves that people who do terrible things cannot be human, we forget the logical implications of that; that only the inhuman are capable of doing terrible things.

And we’re human. We know this for sure. So therefore whatever we do, cannot be terrible. Because we’d know if we crossed that line, right? Our friends, our family, our coworkers… None of these people are inhuman. We know them, we talk to them, we care about them. So, logically, they could never be capable of anything truly monstrous. Because only monsters can be monstrous.

The Nazis were human. That’s the worst, and by far the most important lesson of the Holocaust. That humans did those things. That every single person you know is, under the right circumstances, capable of the most monstrous acts imaginable.

That’s why so many people cannot bring themselves to believe that what is happening in Gaza is a genocide; because they believe that only inhuman monsters can commit genocide, and they cannot call every person in Isreal an inhuman monster, can they?

It’s not our humanity that keeps us good. Goodness is not inherent, or God given, or born into us. It’s a choice we have to make, every single moment of every single day.

Every time you tell yourself that the worst people in the world aren’t really people, you make it just a little bit easier to cross those lines. To do something truly monstrous. Because the one thing you know for sure is that you are not a monster.

The Dem establishment will obviously blame anyone but themselves. That’s what establishments do. That’s why, assuming there are still free and fair elections in America in two years time, left wing voters in the US need to start planning now how they’re going to primary out every last establishment Dem who thought that leaning right was the answer, and replace them with people who do believe in real progressive politics.

It won’t work everywhere. It can’t. And some of those people will inevitably get caught up in the machine, or turn out not to be what they claimed. Reality is messy. But get enough of them in and you can make a real difference. The mid-terms are the American left’s opportunity to do what the right did in 2010.

But at the end of the day none of this matters, because we’re just two outsiders pontificating over another country’s politics. Despite how deeply those politics affect the whole world, there’s nothing we can actually do about it, other than focusing on what we can do in our own back yards.

Never underestimate the “fuckton of playtime” option. Some people just get really into a game.

Oh yeah, that list is going to be an absolute goldmine for scammers.

And honestly, if crypto people had any self reflection at all, the fact that being overtly a crypto person makes scammers flock to them, because they have hard data showing, statistically, how gullible they are should really make them reconsider being crypto people.

They actually do… Or at least, the government as a whole does. If you look back at the great depression, WW2 and its aftermath, and the radical actions that the US government took to solve the cost of living crisis then, you can see that it absolutely is possible.

Would it have been possible for Biden in 2020? Technically, yes. The Dems held two branches, and with an end to the filibuster rule and court packing they could theoretically have secured control in the third. A razor thin margin in the senate would have required some very clever, and possibly very ruthless backroom dealing to get things done. But the possibility did, technically, exist.

Buying into the narrative that radical solutions are impossible is exactly why people are sick of the Democrats. Yes, obviously Trump will only make things worse, but the average person doesn’t see that. They only see that they tried handing the keys to the Dems, things only got worse, so now they’re going to try handing the keys to the other guys.

Yes, they are morally culpable too. Even more so than the people who refused to vote for them.

That’s the thing about ethics when you actually apply it in reality; someone else being wrong doesn’t mean you’re right.

So, it was worth Trump getting a second term in order for you to maintain your moral purity?

Listen, fuck Harris and every other Dem who failed to condemn the war in Gaza, they all deserve to burn in hell for that.

But did you really get what you wanted out of this?

“orcs”

Cut that shit the fuck out. Dehumanization is the weapon of the enemy. We do not use it.

I actually completely agree. This is exactly the point Bernie was making when he said that the Dems brought their loss on themselves by abandoning the working class.

Canadian leftists need to really focus in on issues of cost of living, access to housing and education, the things that working class people are worried about.

I’m queer, and I’m married to a trans woman. I’m not saying the left should give up on talking about issues of inequality and social justice. But I am saying that we need a message that resonates with working class voters, not just people on the margins.

We need to make unions cool again. We need to get the rugged individualists excited about solar power (what’s more rugged and self sufficient than powering your home with nothing but the light of the sun?). We need to start talking about cutting those millionaire and billionaire elites down to size.

This isn’t easy. We’ll need to find careful ways to shape these messages, because there are a lot of thought terminating cliches that you’ll trip up on if you’re too direct. But I think the possibility is there. Even when you can’t talk about “socialism” and collectivism, you can still say things like “community” and “people having each other’s backs.” Appeal to the ideals that they want to think they believe in.

Don’t do their work for them.

Sometimes, simply existing is the greatest act of rebellion. Let your life be an affront to them, every single day. Get up just to spite them.

Locking up Trump wouldn’t have kept the Republicans from winning. They’d have just found another candidate willing to say the same things.