This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “How long will it take for new companies to build in the US creating good jobs and bringing America back from foreign dependent markets after the tariffs take effect?”
There is no detangling from foreign suppliers in almost literally every market.
For instance, you may have a homegrown bakery that you want to grow into a nationwide franchise that employs several hundred, but can’t without relying on foreign markets for product ingredients, equipment, or supplies to allow your operation to grow.
International interdependence is how to streamline costs through the same economic principle of economies of scale that would solve the corrupt American healthcare scam.
For example, you may be able to source grain from American farmers, but there’s an upper limit to how much you could buy locally. That would create an upper limit on your franchise growth. You may not be able to source much or any of your yeast from local markets, and you’ll be stuck having to import it at exorbitant prices due to Trump’s tariffs.
As you retool your nation’s supply chains to meet the needs of thriving businesses, you would still have to rely on foreign markets until you’ve made the hard choices of pushing out some business activities to make way for the successful or chosen industries to grow. While your nation adjusts to rely on tea production, you would shut down coffee bean plantations to provide enough land to grow your tea.
In the long run, as the U.S. adjusts to an entirely different lifestyle, you would change your expectations for the luxuries you currently take for granted. You would lose some major industries to make way for others.
You would no longer have any Starbucks, or you’d have to pay $20.00 for a cup of coffee, which would dramatically reduce the availability of Starbucks in your nation. Instead of walking down the street for a cup of joe, you’d find yourself driving to another town.
The transitions implied by your question involve a radical reshaping of your economic landscape that will not be a smooth change into lifestyles you’ve grown used to. You must prepare yourself to experience a painfully jarring and volatile rush of disappointments and escalating costs that would guarantee you having to endure a decades-long depression while losing almost everything you now take for granted.
Assuming you can succeed in transitioning to a self-contained economy, your nation would more closely resemble North Korea than whatever it is today. You won’t live long enough to experience the “New America,” but your grandchildren might have fond memories of the last Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream sold at an auction for $10,000.00.
It seems too many MAGAts are utterly oblivious to how badly they’ve been conned by a con artist who should be rotting behind bars like every other convicted felon.
It’s heartbreaking that you’ll have to suffer so incredibly intensely to take back your nation and return it to a stable state of interdependent membership in a global community. You can forget global leadership, though. That’s gone forever.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Question for Canadians, specifically those who are Conservatives. Do you think Pierre Poilievre ought remain leader of the CPC following the loss of two elections and loss of his own seat? No rants please, I am looking for thoughtful answers.”
Have a look at this picture. It’s a photo of the ballot in Pierre Poilievre’s Carleton riding. It contains, I believe, about 91 names of candidates who are mostly independents.
This ballot contains over 85 people in his neighbourhood who were so moved to get rid of him that they chose to run against him.
This speaks volumes well above and beyond whatever national animosity he earned while in the public eye. These are people who know him on a personal level.
They know enough about him and his twenty years of service, accomplishing nothing of benefit for them while cultivating a misanthropic attitude toward them, as he consistently voted against measures that would help them.
They knew that he was no representative of their needs in government and went far above and beyond just voting against him or choosing to campaign on behalf of his opponent.
They wanted him gone and were not motivated enough to support any particular candidate, so they chose the only option they felt they had… to run against him.
This isn’t typical political animosity. This is personal animosity.
These people know him and hate him as a person.
When a leader with integrity loses their seat in a typical competition without this level of animosity toward them, they re-evaluate their success as a leader and do what Jagmeet Singh did — step down.
They make room in the party for another leader to step forward to allow them and the party an opportunity to succeed where they may not have succeeded.
Jagmeet had an uphill battle in this election because Donald Trump and the divisive Conservatives forced this into a two-party election. His party and the country value his contribution as a Canadian who loves his country. Respect for his integrity has only shot up because he decided to step down.
Canada, as a whole, has had enough of Conservative incompetence for a long time now. The ABC (Anyone But Conservative) voting strategy became popular because of Stephen Harper. Harper is arguably the worst PM in Canadian history, who has not only done significant damage to the nation and its safety net but continues to create harm on a global basis while supporting a fascist takeover of governments around the world.
All of their campaigning is focused on divisiveness, fear and hate-mongering while fabricating smear tactics taken straight from the Nazi playbook.
Since losing in Canada, they have escalated their divisive campaigning, and Danielle Smith, the Alberta premier, has just begun a separatist campaign in Canada as a power grab for their hateful ideology.
These people do not put their community, province, or nation’s needs above their desires for power. They don’t care about established law or treaties that predate the founding of their nation or province. (Just like what is happening to an 800-year-old precedent of due process in the U.S.) It shows in every one of them as they ignore the people’s wishes and carve out paths to authoritarianism worldwide.
A true leader of the people understands and respects that they are temporary custodians of a tradition of support for the people.
Everywhere you look where an authoritarian government exists, you see someone focused on egotistical concerns. They don’t put the people they are tasked to and trusted with a sacred responsibility to do their best for the people above their desires.
To them, the people are a means to an end, not the end itself.
Poilievre shows he is cut from the same cloth as Donald Trump, who was so upset with losing the prior election that he encouraged an attempted coup of the nation. Even now, he and his minions work toward having him succeed in being elected for a third term.
Poilievre is following in Trump’s extremist footsteps by insisting he remains the leader of the party and will likely try to supplant another party member to continue hanging onto power.
This should be a time of reflection for the Conservatives, to rethink their values and strategies for doing right by the nation they serve, but that’s not the case these days with Conservatives worldwide.
We are in the throes of a fascist resurgence as a direct consequence of the economic disparity forcing people into extremes of thought and action.
Everything we are struggling with today is precisely due to a distorted economic landscape. Consequently, Canada is now dealing with a mania for power that would almost appear cartoon-like were it not so threatening to global stability.
A leader who loses not only an election they should have won by a massive margin, but also one they would have won by 30 points according to the polls only two months ago, is a rank failure in leadership. If he were a person of integrity who cared about putting the nation first, he would have already announced his intention to step down. Instead, we are saddled with this cartoon of egotistical buffoonery.
One would assume the Conservative Party of Canada wishes to be taken seriously by Canadians as a party that cares enough to put country over party. If so, they must push Pierre Poilievre to step down.
Canada is not the U.S., which gives Conservatives a pass when they lie about putting Country over party and then proceed to betray the country for decades upon decades to allow a depraved monster to tear down what we have all worked hard and sacrificed much to build.
If Americans no longer want to lead the world in what it means to be a democracy, then Canada will handily step up to the plate and show the world that we will not allow another fascist regime to threaten our future as a people.
We will do whatever TF it takes to ensure the will of the people consistently overrides the will of any would-be king.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why is that for Chinese living inside China, the Chinese government is not perfect, but for people looking at China from the outside, the Chinese government looks like it is run by geniuses who plan far ahead into the future?”
I believe it’s important to highlight a harsh truth that completely escapes MAGAt minds.
China isn’t “run by geniuses” but by ordinary minds who use “common sense” to plan “far ahead into the future.” They leverage the minds of their people, and many are geniuses, making incredible technological breakthroughs.
Nations cannot plan for the short term without missing the boat on the long term. People can prepare for the short term because the lives of individual people are short compared to the lives of nations. Nations must plan for millions of lives and not just one.
“Common sense” leadership is acknowledging one’s limitations and relying respectfully on the crowd’s wisdom to achieve a nation’s most significant potential. Authoritarian mindsets will always fail against this kind of “common sense.”
It doesn’t take a genius to figure this out.
All that’s required is not to be a stupid, short-sighted narcissist who thinks the world magically dances to the sound of one’s voice.
That’s precisely the problem fueling the self-destructive hubris sending the U.S. careening into becoming a third-world shithole and all of this is entirely due to the machinations of short-sighted bigots whose goal is the resurgence of another Reich because they continue to refuse to learn from history.
MAGAts may claim to value “common sense,” but their short-sighted and self-serving biases are not “common sense,” but an entirely “subjective and self-destructive sense.”
This period in history is teaching us once again that we must cure our species of the authoritarian virus that we have been fighting against since the dawn of human civilization.
China has had enough experience with authoritarianism to know how to handle the U.S. slide into fascism.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What are the most promising innovations or strategies today that could sustainably eliminate extreme poverty within the next generation?”
Thank you for the A2A, Faux-Bill. It is well beyond obvious that you are not the OG Bill Gates but a pretender. Whatever motivates you to disguise yourself as him and pose questions that he never would in such a forum is rationalized as a strategy for gaining attention that you believe you would not otherwise get.
I don’t believe questions like these require the kind of “celebrity boost” you’ve attached to them because I’m sure many people are thinking about these issues. Many politicians sadly believe people’s thoughts on these issues are irrelevant to their societal role. Nothing could be further from the truth because most of the world’s citizens sincerely desire an end to unnecessary strife across the globe.
Only the most psychologically scarred members of society wish harm to people on the other side of the globe or in the dingiest parts of their cities.
Even though people know this is a fake profile and that many would overlook this question based on precisely that, some people will still step forward and offer their views. Their answers support what I just said about people wanting to see change for the better, particularly when it is within our means to eliminate extreme poverty today.
Sadly, many politicians fail to comprehend that we are in this together, and that together means all of humanity must work toward common goals, such as eliminating poverty for it to happen. Even worse is that success requires our politicians to play the role of leader in society in earnest rather than as a performative lark to disguise their motivations for personal gain.
Far too few view their role beyond the boundaries of gamesmanship within the local jurisdiction of interpersonal dynamics of cliques, such as those commonly found in high school environments. They perform for each other and to the public at large. At the same time, their functional contributions are limited to shuffling game pieces in a subsection of the larger gameboard of their political community. Forget about communities elsewhere. That would constitute effort in thinking about and doing something about something elsewhere that isn’t directly connected to the influential factors governing their daily lives. Indirect connections don’t factor into their minds.
Here’s an obvious example of the complexity of dynamics that not enough people consider in their thoughts about how to improve our world and address issues like extreme poverty on the other side of the globe:
In this simple description of consequences, ten interconnected steps are outlined to arrive at the fundamental message that closing a door to a trading partner out of spite hurts oneself more than it hurts the trading partner.
China’s economy will contract briefly as it adjusts to a new reality. Americans, however, will suffer more in the long term because this attitude of bullying one’s partners closes off many doors of opportunity.
The same is true with the global tariff tirade and betraying a long-standing alliance with a supportive partner. Isolationism hurts the isolationists more than it hurts anyone they reject, and that’s where we’re at when considering issues of extreme poverty on the other side of the globe.
It is, unfortunately, too easy to rationalize how those problems “over there” are not one’s concerns here, but the reality is that poverty exists here as well. It’s just an arguable point about which is the easiest to ignore.
As you can see from the variety of answers given to this question and the variety of questions similar to this one, along with all the many other answers given to those questions, people want to solve this problem.
This brings us to the core problem at the heart of why the problem identified within this question persists.
The sad reality is that the core problem is YOU, Bill.
You and the existence of centibillionaires in today’s world are the reason why extreme poverty persists.
I understand how easy it is to rationalize your business successes as justification for having superior insights that can function like a paternalistic entity that can guide the little children of humanity toward a brighter future. I understand your rationale for the sheer capitalization required to provide the world with ecologically superior toilets. Still, you already know how you managed to distribute millions of life-saving nets in underdeveloped environments only through synergy. You relied on many people to rally behind your cause and donate whatever small amounts they could to solve a serious problem affecting millions of lives.
You made that happen, not with your capitalization but by leveraging some of your resources, connections, and celebrity status to mobilize people worldwide to provide a simple solution to a destructive problem.
Suppose you and the rest of the world sincerely desire an end to extreme poverty. In that case, there is only one solution, which begins with triage to stem the bleeding of resources that could collectively resolve the problem instead of exacerbating it, as has been the case due to extreme economic disparity.
The most successful way we have been in eliminating poverty worldwide as a society and a species has been through the massive growth of the middle class, as we experienced following the Second World War, FDR’s New Deal, and the development of unions.
By empowering the middle class with disposable income, we boosted economic performance along many vectors that were also boosted by force multipliers, which spread outward in orders of magnitude beyond what is possible today with coalesced wealth.
The existence of centibillionaires has made the goal of eliminating poverty impossible because this historically destructive concentration of wealth creates poverty through a contraction of available economic resources once wielded by hundreds of millions of people.
You know this. At least, the real Bill Gates does… as does every billionaire around the globe.
You cannot become a billionaire and be oblivious to how your concentrated wealth is a deprivation of wealth for others.
None of you is blind to this.
Since it’s taken decades of erosion of the gains that took a capitalist system decades of growth to achieve the highest level of poverty elimination, reversing that damage would mean decades of effort we don’t have the luxury of taking without experiencing a system-wide collapse.
We need bold efforts and fundamental changes to the economy and structure to meet a rapidly changing employment dynamic. We have no choice but to retool our economy before an increasingly rapid transformation toward fully automated societies where most production is performed in dark factories.
Suppose we don’t institute bold changes today. In that case, the transition will result in massive numbers of collateral damage that will be responded to with system-wide chaos because people will not shut up and die quietly as they find themselves starving for food and made homeless. When people have nothing left to live for after having their means of survival stripped from them, they become radicalized to such a degree that they are like cornered animals and will bring much destruction to the world before they exit it.
We need to reverse course on the corrosion done to our economies through the problem of wealth disparity yesterday. This should not be a debate today; if you were the real Bill Gates, you know this.
There isn’t a single billionaire who doesn’t understand this. You are all also hedging your bets while, like every cowardly politician who doesn’t want to risk their comfortable positions, none of you want to be the first to acknowledge what needs to be done. Your reticence is understandable because your community is primarily dominated by sociopathic thinking. It would behoove you to remind your peers that each passing day this nightmare of disparity remains unaddressed is a day closer to the massive unrest that brings out the guillotines.
This brings us to the core concern driving this question.
Which strategy is the most effective resource to invest your attention?
What singular and most expediently implemented solution can effectively stave off and resolve the growing pressure leading to widespread chaos?
That’s easy, and you already know the answer… if you were the real Bill Gates.
Reset capitalism like a Monopoly board.
There’s been enough testing to know this is THE solution to restore economic justice and dramatically impact poverty worldwide.
You already know this.
The only real issue at stake is the best means of implementing it.
Here’s a link introducing the various issues to consider with costing strategies that can be discussed earnestly. These are just details to work out. The result, however, is a stable economy that can eliminate poverty worldwide while eventually making performative forms of altruism moot.
However, every one-percenter should champion this solution in principle in earnest today, particularly if they want to avoid the chaos that risks them losing everything.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What’s the point of working if you can live through getting “benefits”?”
You’re asking the wrong question.
Instead, you should ask, “What is the point of living like a lazy slug who accomplishes nothing and does nothing to make themselves feel good about themselves or their lives?”
That’s what you’re implying with your question.
You imply a false dichotomy between living one’s life based on laziness rather than doing what motivates them or submitting themselves to an abusively dehumanizing existence as a disposable cog to make someone else rich while struggling with one’s self-respect.
Life isn’t a choice between working and not working. It’s a choice between employment as a wage slave or generating an income for oneself based on doing what matters to them and which motivates them to be excited about their lives.
Employment used to be a motivator when the income generated enough to go well beyond meeting basic needs and into enough disposable income to invest in one’s future.
That’s no longer the case.
Employment today is the equivalent of a lifetime of dog-paddling in an ocean until one gets too tired and drowns.
That’s not a life. That’s a lifetime prison sentence.
What’s the point of struggling in poverty until you die to make someone else wealthy when you can be much happier and less stressed while doing what you love?
Bonus Question: Should there be a universal basic income to address economic inequality?
UBI doesn’t address the issue of economic inequity, and it isn’t intended to.
UBI provides economic stability and gives people room to make the best choices for themselves without having a desperate need to survive leveraged against them.
UBI frees people from the pressures of meeting basic survival needs enough to escape oppressive working conditions. The consequences of businesses losing the leverage of economic desperation to create downward pressure on wages can more easily permit upward pressure on wages.
This change in a negotiating dynamic contributes to a reduction in economic disparity, but it doesn’t address it head-on.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Would people continue to work if everyone received a universal basic income ($2,000 per month) for the rest of their lives?”
The numerous tests that have been performed bear out that they would, but that’s overlooking the problem with this question and its mindset.
The people who ask this question never bother to consider the percentage of the population that never has to work for someone else to sustain a living income.
The average net worth of the top 0.1% worldwide is around $62 million.
No one in this wealth category must work for an income at any point throughout their lives. Having their money in a low-interest-bearing account would be enough to live on the interest alone and without touching their capital.
0.1% of the population is 8 million people.
Eighty million people worldwide comprise the top 1% of the population, with an average net worth equivalent to the lifetime earnings of most reasonably upper-middle-class workers. No one in this entire group of 80 million people must be employed to survive comfortably.
Every time the question of how people will live once they are no longer forced into an (often abusive) employment relationship (in which abusive employment conditions comprise the primary reason people leave their jobs), the implication is that they will turn into lazy do-nothing slugs.
Meanwhile, 80 million people somehow find ways to keep themselves occupied daily without anyone wondering if they’re lazy layabouts. Even if they are, no one seems to care.
All of the tests performed to determine the viability of UBI involve people who would otherwise be compelled to work in soul-crushing roles while being subjected to people on power trips who should never have any power over other people.
No one who asks this question seems to consider how those 80 million people manage to make it through their lives doing absolutely nothing. No one assumes they do nothing because we see the results everywhere. In fact, without that group of 1% elites, we’d never know the upward mobility that has led to the creation of a centibillionaire class.
The reality that the misanthropes presuming people need to be herded like animals throughout their lives is that without having to piss away most of their lives on basic survival, people would invest their time in themselves and become involved in activities that bring meaning to their lives.
Whether that constitutes “work” or not is a matter of semantics. Many people who would not be required to commute to a daily dehumanizing ritual of functioning like a disposable cog would perform functions in society that many others would find valuable.
Some would devote their lives to becoming successful caretakers for their families, friends, and neighbours in need while adding positive value to their community with basic tasks such as performing chores others could not. They may choose not to devote their time to salaried activities because they would find more significant meaning in helping their community address some fundamental needs capitalists don’t care about addressing. After all, there’s no profit in providing mental health services to those in need.
(Meanwhile, we are suffering from a mental health pandemic affecting one in five people. A whopping majority — 70%-80% — of families are dysfunctional. We are a species in desperate need of focusing on our mental health issues.)
People in general would also be much more free to focus on community needs and political dynamics such that when they go to the polls to cast their ballot, they would do so from a perspective of much greater insight into the candidates and the issues than they can currently afford to focus on now while working two jobs to survive at a minimally conscious level.
(How are people supposed to find time to understand the intricacies of nuanced issues if a majority are unclear on how something as simple as how tariffs affect their lives?)
The people who ask this question also seem oblivious to how long and how much effort is required to develop a successful career. Without external resources and funding, creating a successful enterprise takes much more time than it does to create one that’s been heavily capitalized.
Let’s say, for example, you’ve created a special recipe for a unique jam that everyone in your neighbourhood loves. You can get busy and produce perhaps 1000 jars of jam per month, which earns you enough to continue making 1000 jars of product while supporting yourself, and while eventually being able to afford increasing your production slowly over time by being able to expand your operation by reinvesting into it. You can slowly add to equipment and materials and hire assistance on both a production level to increase output volume and a professional level to expand market presence.
Let’s say that your success allows you to create a one-million-dollar per year business after 10 years of effort. If you had the capitalization required to purchase all your equipment, staffing, and professional assistance up front, you could easily achieve that one-million-dollar per year revenue level within half the time.
This is how massive franchises grow from small mom-and-pop operations into national chains within a few years. Capitalization is everything in building a successful enterprise. If one has no capitalization, then time is everything to them. Time is money.
Without the wealth to propel a business into respectable success as defined by a capitalist marketplace, one still has to work hard on one’s dream to achieve it. People are not discouraged from working while collecting enough to live on in a UBI program. The opposite is true. They are free to pursue their dreams and benefit from the sweat of their brow without having to sacrifice their lives feeding a parasite that views them as disposable commodities.
People have a far greater incentive to work for themselves than they ever could working for an abusive employer.
That’s the lesson the one percent teach us about humanity.
Only misanthropic cynics believe human beings become slugs when they’re given enough money to choose not to submit themselves to making other people rich at the cost of their life satisfaction.
People don’t need to be whipped to work. Anyone with experience working with volunteers understands what it means to dedicate time and energy toward causes which matter, and the fact is that not all things which matter involve acquiring vast stores of material wealth.
Life satisfaction is worth far more than money.
The best and only way to achieve life satisfaction is to focus one’s time and energy on doing what they love and applying themselves to produce outcomes they can be proud of. Rarely does that satisfaction get defined by money… and certainly not by those in society whom we recognize as psychologically healthy individuals whom we respect and admire as human beings.
We have learned and continue to realize that those among us who worship wealth acquisition above basic human decency are the most broken and villainous threats to our social stability and progress.
People often blame money as the root of all evil, but that’s not the case; the love of money is above all else.
UBI is the freedom to pursue our higher human aspirations, not an excuse to become lazy.
If having money made people lazy, we would not now have centibillionaires walking among us in a psychotic competition to become the world’s first trillionaire.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Is economic nationalism the solution to preserving jobs, or will it create deeper global divisions?” Responses to follow-up questions are included along with the answer given to this question.
Economic nationalism is economic isolation in a highly interconnected world.
It means shutting a nation off from the rest of the world.
It means North Korea.
It means a complete restructuring of an economy to adapt to an impoverished and repressive existence without access to a diversity of goods, services, and technologies that permit a nation to evolve and organically create jobs.
In today’s world, it means dropping out of the global trend toward automation for the citizenry. It means the people learn to adapt to functioning as disposable serfs to an elite class that avails itself of all the perks the rest of the world enjoys.
It means a government focuses on conscripting the able-bodied to serve primarily as military drones to eventually become cannon fodder with expansionist strategies to keep their economy from collapsing altogether.
The global divisions are the ones that a nation makes as it shuts itself off from functional relationships with other countries.
The rest of the world will continue to develop and strengthen its international relationships to become a united entity that can push back on expansionist regimes.
For the U.S., it means going from being a global power to being a global radioactive zone until it can be fully isolated.
Follow-up Question #1:
Is there any scenario where a nation can balance economic nationalism with global trade, or is full integration the only path to prosperity?
The term “full integration” implies a loss of identity and sovereignty. Neither of those is true. In Canada, an external threat to national identity immediately rallied the people into a unified front to protect their sovereignty.
Meanwhile, you can drive around Canada and seldom see the performative patriotism you can see everywhere in the (highly divided) U.S.
Follow-up Question #2:
Do you think Canada’s approach is unique, or have other nations successfully balanced global ties with a strong national identity?
I can’t speak for other nations, but I have long recognized the distinction between a melting pot and a multicultural mosaic.
For all the reverential lip service American culture displays toward individuality, its practice of homogeneity runs counter to that professed ideal.
On the other hand, Canadian culture promotes community through a practiced respect for individuality.
This contrast addresses the difference between a genuinely profound love of country organically cultivated versus a performative love of country cultivated through grooming.
It’s the difference between a deeply held but silent personal belief versus the cultivated optics of shallow regard for something that can be leveraged for sociopathic motivations through attention-focusing performances.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What does it mean in MAGA when Musk calls US farmers as “collateral damage”?”
The term “collateral damage” was first applied by the military when assessing how many innocent casualties would be created when assaulting an enemy.
It was a way of dehumanizing those who happened to be in the vicinity — in the wrong place at the wrong time — and who may or may not have been guilty of collusion with the target but were considered expendable.
For Elon, it means that he views the farmers whose lives he destroys as enemies whom he dehumanizes while waging a war against American citizens to acquire material wealth.
For someone like Elon to use this expression, he’s letting the little people know that’s how the 1% regards the majority of the people, as acceptable casualties in their power games.
He is confirming that the 1% view us all as less than human and as disposable as they have always considered their slaves to be throughout history.
The 1% have been consistent in choosing profit over lives. Elon has admitted it’s not an either/or situation but a situation of strategic intent to destroy the lives of the many to enrich the few.
Everything about the Trump administration is a blatant act of assault against the majority, while robbing us all and killing us in the process, not out of necessity but expedience.
Bonus Question: What do you think of Musk’s Tesla losing money and Twitter crashing?
I think it can’t happen fast enough.
The best thing we can do for society and the future of humanity is to make the wealthiest man on the planet homeless and destitute.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “How would you design a society where everyone has the opportunity to succeed?”
Until Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, humanity was well on its way to perfecting that democratic society in which everyone had a reasonable opportunity to achieve class mobility and a basic form of success that permitted a life of dignity with what was characterized as the “American Dream.”
A mortgage on a house with a surrounding picket fence, a vehicle, a family with 2.5 kids and an annual vacation wasn’t only possible but virtually guaranteed to anyone who made the effort to earn it.
They betrayed the entire middle class around the world to curry favour from the wealthy who have long desired a return to a barbaric age of kingdoms with rulers and disposable serfs.
We failed to modernize the one institution that has proven itself the greatest threat to the goal of an egalitarian society, industry.
Almost every other entity in society is a democratic body. Corporations, however, are holdovers from a medieval structure of rigid hierarchy fraudulently appointing members to an inner circle of power, allegedly based on merit, while elevating those who support their corrupt application of power.
We can repair this mess of corruption with only a few fixes, but one of the most important and most easily overlooked solutions will be a difficult challenge to implement. It will (and has been) meet(ing) massive resistance by those who most adamantly refuse to give up their power, as it involves restructuring how corporations exist and do business in society.
We can quickly implement numerous initiatives today, such as UBI, Universal Healthcare, and Universal access to education, that will have long-term implications leading toward much more stable societies that can guard against corruption.
Other initiatives, such as a global cap on personal net worth and restructuring industry into democratic institutions, are potentially much more disruptive to society. We are, however, fortunate to find ourselves amidst a radical transformation into full automation throughout every level of society. This transformation will allow us to restructure political systems while increasingly democratizing society and flattening global power structures.
The only way to ensure society can facilitate opportunities for everyone to succeed is to flatten power and spread it across the globe to the people. At this stage in our history, our existence faces an existential threat due to the corruption of disproportionate power running rampant throughout society. It may be the case that we will have to rely on historical inspirations to repair the damage the wealthy class has done to society and make reparations for their betrayal of the social contract.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Where did Pierre Poilievre go wrong? How did he blow it?”
Rather than answer this question directly because it’s already been answered well enough, I want to explain why Reich-wing politics has been going wrong for a long time.
In a nutshell, they offer nothing beyond rage bait. They offer no vision, no solutions, no analyses. They offer no ideas for anything not based on imposition and an upward redistribution of wealth.
They have been wallowing in a cynically misanthropic view of their constituents and the system of governance they pretend to represent as wolves in sheep’s clothing for several decades now.
Trudeau may not have been perfect in every respect, but he came through when it counted. His heart and mind were in the right place. He is a man of integrity who realized that the public develops fatigue after a decade.
He chose to do what Joe Biden did by reading the room and putting country over personal aspirations.
He chose to do the honourable thing that a selfless person would do when they love their country. He made way for the next leader, who would be the right person to carry the torch for the next cycle.
Poilievre had a winning hand that he could have used to coast into leadership. All he had to do was offer the people some uplifting and inspirational ideas. Had he been capable of extolling the benefits of a vision that could align a nation in solidarity against a rapidly changing world where a long-standing alliance suddenly threatened our nation’s sovereignty, he could have been viewed as a potential hero for the people.
The trouble is that he’s not a people person. He cannot care about people, and he repeatedly demonstrates his misanthropic disdain for the people through numerous heinous examples, like denying the pain and suffering of families who have endured horrors like the residential school nightmare.
Instead of contrasting against the orange enemy to the south, he echoes him in attitude and virtually guarantees a similar destruction of Canada that Trump has created for our neighbours.
Poilievre, Trump, and CONservative notables worldwide have embraced this same ethos of disdain for the people and the democratic principles they have sworn to uphold.
Instead of presenting solutions to problems, they point fingers of blame at an opponent they treat like a foreign enemy and hurl confessions as accusations to stir up divisive public ire rather than messages of unity or a path to solidarity.
About four or so decades ago, Conservative campaign strategists discovered the effectiveness of negative campaigning and took to it like ducks to water.
Choosing that simplistic and simple-minded but winning strategy allowed them to abdicate their responsibility to devise productive strategies for motivating a nation to grow together.
Over time, they lost their ability to develop sound policy while focusing solely on attacking their opposition with increasing hyperbolic negativity.
Watching how that strategy has played out in the U.S. has made it clear to many Canadians that we don’t want to import that destructive nonsense. We’re better than that.
We’re getting tired of the negativity and want authentic leadership.
When a genuine leader stepped forward to present Canadians with a real vision, real solutions, solid ideas, and the courage to face down a legitimate enemy and tame him, it was immediately apparent to many Canadians that Poilievre wasn’t even in the same league of leadership.
It’s like comparing a junior league hockey player with a Stanley Cup champion.
The entire world has also been running out of tolerance for the childish antics of the narcissistic incel troglodytes and their perpetual nasal drip of toxic spew.
The endless hate-mongering is tiresome and emotionally draining. Living in a fog of pollution reminds me of the wafting odours I grew up with in a town with multiple pulp mills. There were days when the smell caused headaches.
I remember how people who were employed by the pulp mills expected shortened lifespans from their jobs, but extolled the benefits of getting a fresh coat of paint on their vehicles every couple of years because of the damage to the paint by just being parked in the lot while they worked their shift.
CONservatives today remind me of that toxic gas that one learned to endure as it filled the town’s air to overwhelm one’s senses. We learned to carry on with our days despite it. We also knew its long-term effects were destructive. We endured it because those mills were essential to sustaining our town’s economy.
We lived off the gas that poisoned us.
That’s what Conservatives have become for society and the people they revile as “woke” are waking up to how they hate being lied to and played like puppets for the benefit of a few who laugh at our naivety as they rip us off while calling us losers and suckers.
This is who and what they are. Until they can be incentivized to be better humans, they will continue to fill the air with life-threatening toxins.
Pierre didn’t “blow it” because he can’t be anything but a product of his grooming. He’s not a leader and never has been anything but a mouthpiece for those who gave him his marching orders.
The people responsible for blowing the lead they had been given on a silver platter are those who convinced a nation of 350 million people that a 34 times convicted felon would be a saviour of a country.
The toxic people who are motivated by hatred blew it because they presume everyone is as broken and toxic as they are.
It’s like every racist believes everyone else is racist. That’s the only way they can justify their hate-mongering and live with it. If they woke up one day and honestly faced the ugly truth about themselves, many would be so horrified by the ugliness in their nature that they would break into pieces.
We’re done with the negativity and want something to live for, not fight against.
thotbag 