I absolutely *hate* it when Canadian politics gets “interesting”. Usually it ends badly. Sigh. 😔

Software engineer, creative coder, aspiring generative artist, fridgebuzz.tez/.eth

There is a reason “May you live in interesting times” is a curse and not a blessing! 

I have intentionally been ignoring the news here. I know nothing can get worse until he officially takes office in a month so giving myself this last few weeks to make some headspace to deal with that dark upcoming reality.

GenX girl who learned the hard way 🔹 lifelong artist 🔹 software engineer 🔹 curator of conversations 🔹 made /blend-o-rama 🔹 thinks you're cool

A part of why the 🇨🇦 political drama is so unsettling is because of Trump. Because we need to be strong as a country and not fighting amongst ourselves. Or else we’ll just go the same way as 🇺🇸. Actually it’s probable that we will, anyway, so I should try to ignore it but it’s hard. 😔 If only we had a law forbidding elected officials from intentionally lying to the public.

Lying is the most important tool of politicians. There is no way they will ever be separated from that. 

The difference, it seems, as fascism takes hold, is that there is no longer any kind of accountability when they are caught in lies. They can just make up reality to fit their biases unchallenged and convince the willingly uncritical that they are telling the truth to get them to hand them more power. 

And even worse, we have no good source of reliable facts anymore. I would say part of that is because AI is so good at faking things, but even without that, there is no objective media anymore. You can’t trust their editorializing and can barely trust their reporting because it has lies of omission or is spun to bias. So staying informed about reality is almost impossible too.

We just have to focus on our own survival and survival of our loved ones at this point. Eventually the pendulum will swing back to a more equitable situation, but we are going to have to endure a lot of pain before that.

I empathize here. Our Democratic Party had the opportunity to fix a lot of things while they were in the majority of all our branches, yet they chose not to change anything because they didn’t want to push “conventions” that the other party has no convictions to not run all over when they get full power. 

There is no incentive for the people in power to change the system that puts them in power. The only way to change that is through a revolt of the governed and that is never peaceful. 

And they keep us all from revolting against the government by pitting us against each other with identity politics and try to hide the REAL disparity between us all that is the difference in classes. The tiny upper class keeps everyone complacent and too busy to revolt by setting up the only way to survive is by employment, and convince us that the problem is someone who looks different from us coming after our jobs, not that we should all have enough to survive by right and that no one should be a billionaire.

Also, money is a concern… even if I have some savings, I think our governments have put us on a path that money is going to be a problem, itself.

The US has devalued the dollar so much since 2008 and it is the reserve currency of the rest of the world. Eventually something has to give and if it is the collapse of the dollar, what else can we invest in?

Crypto is also valued against the dollar, and you can’t easily use it to pay bills. Same for gold, real estate, stocks, etc. I have been thinking about this for a while.

Our current PM could have changed the system. In fact he campaigned on the 2016 election being the “last first-past-the-post” election. He was going to bring in some sort of proportional representation or ranked ballots or basically anything that doesn’t allow a 30% minority of suburban & rural voters from ruling us all. 

And after he was elected he said…”never mind”. 

I am very angry at him for that. 30% will win a majority and in our parliamentary democracy where a lot of stuff is “by convention”, it literally allows the PM to be a dictator. It happened with Stephen Harper and holy shit was it bad! The next guy will be MUCH worse because he’s dumb as a brick and worships Trump. I’m just going to tune it all out and hope I have enough money to survive the coming chaos.