sj_zero

https://horizons.service.canada.ca/en/2025/01/10/future-lives-social-mobility/index.shtml

The government of Canada.

"People may start to hunt, fish, and forage on public lands and waterways without reference to regulations."

It's cool guys! We had two consecutive quarters of economic decline and found out that's not a recession because (checks paper) because I said so.

So everything is fine forever and it's actually good if the economy shrinks!

"I'm invested now so fuck it" hrm... Phrasing?

Aw, nevermind.

Oh! They just didn't call orange man bad!

If only someone had the guts to say orange man bad, but nobody was able to do it!

Shamefur dispuray!

Speedrunning destroying your platform.

Something that I have been warning about for years now is that all of these establishment voices that claim to support a thing are just going to use that thing up and then discard it like a used tissue.

The sooner people realize that, the better off everyone will be. Global megacorps are not your friend.

To be fair, we Canadians have an awful lot to fix that isn't going to get fixed.

Did you read about the recent uncovering of the government report that said that poor people were going to be foraging in the woods for food in the next decade or two? Sure I'm glad that we keep on focusing on the keeping rich people in Europe happy.

Unfortunately, no matter who ended up in charge the debt was always going to rise catastrophically. Trump talked a good game up front, but all you need to do is look at his first term to realize he doesn't want to be the guy who takes anything away. 

But unfortunately even the discussion around this bill shows that his political instincts are correct even if they are going to ultimately help destroy the country. The moment that anything is on The chopping block, everyone starts to panic as if you can just spend unlimited money forever without consequences.

Now people who want to make this a partisan issue are being silly, there is no political party you could vote for other than perhaps the libertarian party who would actually cut spending if given the chance. Unfortunately that's the game that we are playing right now, and you even see it in all the stories listed on this economics community -- nobody wants to lose anything paid for by the state even though nobody is paying the full cost for all the services being presented.

In a previous analysis I realized that the unlimited debt spending is the price of unity. The fact of the matter is that most countries on Earth today need to heavily balkanize, the only reason that they haven't yet is massive government outlays that effectively purchase loyalty. The same thing happened in the final days of rome, and it will continue to work right up until it entirely stopped working and all of these empires collapse. It also happened in Weimar Germany, the late Ottoman empire, and late Qing China. You can't hold an empire together with money forever.

Ironically, nationalism is thought of as a conservative idea, but it is in fact a product of the Jacobins, it's a new idea that doesn't actually work when pressed. The idea of a nation is not new, but the idea that the Jacobins presented of nationalism was a revolutionary idea -- literally it was built into their revolution. The problem is that often revolutionary ideas are empirically false. The United States is not the only country that is going to fall apart, we can already see that many European nations are unlikely to remain in their current form for the next century.

F

Ugly good guy non-isekai

I think you're making a number of major errors in your rant.

Your base assumption "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state" is explicitly fascist, from the lips of Benito Mussolini. Ideally, culture is not the state, and religion is not the state, and the market is not the state. Many enlightenment thinkers who helped produce modern liberal democracy believed in a small state the protected people's rights and believe that such a state could only exist alongside a culture and religion that resulted in people who were good enough when nobody was watching that they didn't need a powerful state to micromanage them. In the absence of that, tyranny would be required and inevitable.

One consequence of this train of thought is you're trying to narrowly define what epistemological basis people are allowed to use to come to opinions. Their opinions are only acceptable if they came to their opinions through the exact same method you personally did. What, exactly, privileges your epistemology over others? Why is it that someone who listens to their pastor is somehow less than you, listening to corporate news?

It appears that you're stuck in the modernist fallacy -- assuming that we need to find one grand narrative and stick with that and through that we'll achieve utopia. Democracy is good, so everything must be democracy or it's bad. This is the totalitarian fallacy of modernity, and we have overwhelming evidence it's false, given how many millions of people totalitarian modernity killed.

Your second assumption "Religion is about not having opinions of your own, just following the opinions of the leader and spread the opinions of the leader" is deeply flawed. You're not describing a religion, you're describing a cult, and a cult that isn't represented in western religious history. In orthodox Christianity, Catholic Christianity, and Protestant Christianity, it is a base axiom that humans have free will and will not always do what their pastor, their cardinal, their bishop, or the pope says. The metaphor of the pastor is that you can't guide a flock with an iron fist, you can only hope to guide them and it's inevitable that some will stray regardless. This way of seeing religious leadership is incompatible with your statement that individuals aren't allowed to have their own opinions.

It is an important counter-point to your formulation that Protestant Christianity exists at all -- it was a schism where people had different opinions to the catholic orthodoxy and instead of just continuing to have the opinions the pope told them to, they created their own sect -- and today there are many different protestant sects of Christianity.

Your "Final Solution to the Religious problem" is wildly authoritarian and hypocritical -- Apparently under your conception of "Democracy", people shouldn't have to agree with their pastor's opinions, but they do have to have the same exact opinions as you or they can be expelled forcibly.

To assume that democracy is always good is also a shaky premise. American democracy formed their new United States with slavery centuries after Europe had essentially banned it under their monarchies and imperial frameworks. Greek democracy had many positives, but it was a slave state and acted deeply dishonorably with respect to the Delian league -- the Parthenon, the symbol of Greek democracy, was effectively built using embezzled funds from the Delian league that were supposed to be used to protect the Hellenic world from the Persians.

Under democracy, there are leaders for sure, though the degree of formalization of that changes based on the form of democracy -- democratic republicanism has democracy, but it is used to elect wise individuals to be the representative leaders. Even in pure democracy, there were people recognized as leaders -- Individuals skilled in rhetoric and logic may not hold formal power, but they could sway the voters to vote in one way or the other, becoming de facto leaders regardless of their formal standing.

The idea that democracy is a telos in and of itself, that it is a moral good in and of itself is to mistake the means for the end -- The end being individuals living a good life.

What you're doing here, which you might not realize because we are the fish made of the water we were born in, is trying to replace theistic dogma with secular dogma -- but the mechanism is equally religious. "Secular religion" might sound like a contradiction in terms, but as an example, Confucianism in China is religious in structure, but non-theistic as when for example you complete a Confucian ritual, it is in pursuit of social harmony rather than because a god or a clergyman told you to.

Your rant is a wonderful screed of the urban monoculture faith -- you took the idea that democracy is good and therefore all things must be good and democratic or they must be destroyed, and really hammered it home. Like a screed about how Jesus loves you and therefore you should work even harder to be a good Christian, it rings hollow for those who don't follow your faith.

Amen.