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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 7th, 2023

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  • We bear witness. But CBC News does not itself designate specific groups as terrorists, or specific acts as terrorism, regardless of the region or the events, because these words are so loaded with meaning, politics and emotion that they can end up being impediments to our journalism.

    Surely there are objective examples that require no attribution though. The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center is a good example.

    As well, I don’t think there’s any argument that the Hamas attack on Israel could be anything other than a terrorist attack (without attribution) because they targeted civilians with the specific intent to kidnap. It wasn’t a country invading another country, or a case of a resistance force pushing out an occupier. Had Hamas attacked only military targets only the hard liners would call it a terrorist attack. But what Hamas committed was terrorist atrocities.

    On the flip side, one could argue that Israel’s retaliations are state-sanctioned reprisals that ostensibly act as a means of terror to the Palestinian population. However, since Israel as a nation is condoning the military action I don’t think it could strictly be said it’s terrorism.






  • I’m not sure what a solution is but I do think that we should encourage people to not have children, stop handing out the baby bonus, and reduce immigration. I feel these moves can provide a (non-genocidal) way to relieving the pressures of human overpopulation. For example, Japan is doing great work in reducing their population, a trend that will reduce the strain of housing and services in that country.



  • But it’s paradoxical. You need population increase to support increasing costs, yet increasing population creates a strain on the finite resources of the planet.

    I acknowledge you said this ignoring the capitalism issues, but if you didn’t ignore it then it wouldn’t really be an issue. We have the wealth to handle this if we had the political courage to force an equitable society.

    Believe it or not, Canada was once a population much lower than 40 million people and we managed just fine. The idea that populations cannot contract is a harmful concept because it forces acceptance of the paradox that we can infinitely grow in a finite world. And this always relies on the use of technology to overcome this. So, instead of reducing the population to the point where automobiles wouldn’t need to be electric, we increase the population and try and find green solutions.





  • Immigrants are at least partly to blame for the pressures. I mean, it’s impossible they’re NOT impacting the cost of housing. If you add 400,000 people to a country and do not add 400,000 units of new housing that year, you’re in a deficit. It’s Grade 1 math.

    But what is genuinely to blame is a cogent political strategy to house Canadians. We can’t just leave it to the private sector to maximize profits. We can’t expect homeowners to make secondary suites. We can’t do nothing.

    Cutting immigration is a sure-fire way to prevent over-demand for a scarce resource. It may sound right-wing but that’s the way it goes.




  • I.e. you see your home as an investment from which you expect to see a positive return, but now you are afraid that it may lose some of that value.

    No, I don’t see it as an investment. The way the system works sees it as an investment. We’ve created a system whereby housing is overvalued because it’s meant to have inflationary payoffs.

    My parents didn’t see our home as an investment. They just bought homes at random that were close to where they worked and seemed good for kids.

    There’s no option for me to buy a place that isn’t an investment because that’s the very nature of the market.



  • Sorry to hear that you went through that.

    In a perfect world I could have had an amicable divorce from my ex and everybody could have stayed in touch and been happy.

    Instead I had a “Michael Bay” divorce where everything went really explosive and badly. It’s sad because I see a lot of example – such as our own prime minister – who have a great divorce where everybody is respectful and mature and life goes happily on.

    I’ve tried to explain to my dad how screwed up it is that he maintains a relationship with my ex despite my zero contact with my kids but he doesn’t care. Actually, he went to my exes wedding with her new husband last month, which involved him flying to my city. He didn’t visit me, which is really the extra cherry on the shit sundae.


  • In “theory” or “legally” I have 50-50 custody. In practice, it’s nearly impossible to enforce visitation with older children. My kids were 15 and 9 when we split. Immediately, the courts said enforcement on the 15-year-old was impossible. I spent a few years battling enforcement on the 9-year-old but she soon also became unenforceable. At a certain point you can’t win if the kids also don’t want to see you or make your visit a nightmare by passively resisting.

    I was in the middle of one of these court battles when my daughter became anorexic and told the medical staff she didn’t want me to visit her in hospital. She was about 13 and that was the last I saw her.

    Legally, I am a 50-50 parent but in reality the only thing I’m entitled to do is pay their mother $1,000 a month.