Market lovers don’t love markets. They love power. And if you can’t exercise power over someone as worthless as the homeless, who can you?

It’s auto-complete. It knows that “4” is the most common substring to follow “2 + 2” in its training. It’s not actually doing addition.

The Liberals are centre-right, especially in Nova Scotia. It’s really interesting to see then pitch this, even if the odds of them following through are very low.

Our centre-left party was in power a decade ago or so, and PR is a corr party position. They didn’t make a single move toward it during their term in office, and haven’t come close to making government since.

A big issue with the 2022 signup wave was the influx of new Masto websites, run by new admins. The subscription model of ActivityPub meant they were mostly contentless, and they weren’t seeded by knowledgeable users. People needed to understand the basics of federation to find anything because nothing was being syndicated on those sites.

And then a bunch of them shut down when admins who were ok hosting hundreds of like-minded users suddenly had thousands of generalist users flooding their sites.

It was major human infrastructure failure.

And that was as a whole bunch of tenured users started getting hostile over people not adopting the idiosyncratic nettiquite of the was-niche-only-yesterday space. The server blocks started rolling out, and people needed to understand the idea of “federation” (and, apparently, “the Internet”) to understand why they were being “denied access” to the cranky people, trolls, and unmoderated spaces.

The truth is, most people don’t like the internet. They like the simple, streamlined process of just being owned by corporate interests. Walles gardens work for them in a way public parks never will.

Uh, probably the default web interface. And Masto servers still lack quite a bit of functionality found on other fedi services.

That is not moderation. Moderation involves removing bad actors from the site, not underground black lists that let you pretend the Nazis aren’t living next door.

Mastodon has local and global feeds, and has for years. Did you just sit in your home feed and wonder where all the stuff you haven’t subscribed to was?

There’s no way to fight them on platforms where they are welcomed by the platform itself. Bluesky doesn’t want to moderate its platform, so there is no fighting the Nazis there.

And we can do this all over again in a couple of years thanks to BlueSky’s refusal to moderte its service, all because internet users refuse to thi:k abput how the internet works, and peoples addictions to being told what to read.

Something something accusation something something confession. Someone should probably keep an eye on this one.

There will be a branch of government telling them what to do. It will just be the courts, as they’re sued into oblivion by IP rights holders.

I would warrant caution and nuance when considering the effect of IdPol on these things. It’s a term that’s been abused and bastardized to high heaven, and it’s a concept that the right has made ample, productive (for them) use of.

The politics of whiteness, the politics of masculinity, the politics of white masculinity, the politics of Christian conservatism, the politics of white nationalism, of Christian nationalism, of white-Christian nationalism, etc., are all IdPol. These are identity groups that the right has very successfully leaned on and groomed.

If you actually look at the Democrats, the Liberals, or even the NDP, what Identity Politics do they actually spout? What do they say that’s such a turn off, with respect to IdPol? It’s very little. Instead, what you actually see is them focusing on issues that matter to women, immigrants, and people of colour, but not to the exclusion of others.

But the right has used the fact that they speak of non-white, non-male, non-Christians at all and used it to reinforce the Identity Politics of the blue collar voter.

The aggrivated teenage sitting at the dinner table whining at you about how racist and imperialist the country is is not engaging in IdPol. They’re engaging in the process of coming to terms with the fact that the world is not how it has been portrayed to them. But the rural Canadian or American voting against their interest because the party that is going to fuck them or their community over the most has done the work to sure up their identity as white, rural, and working class.

Their politics and support follows their identity, not their interests or policy preferences.

That is Identity Politics. And you’re right, it’s toxic.

It’s just not what you were using the word to mean.

That’s way more complex thinking that what people actually do around this. They think he’s good for the econony because he’s rich, or at least plays rich on TV.

CEOs may see him as good for business because rhey believe he’ll make running their businesses cheaper, but the average Trump voter just sees “rich = good with money”, because most people ultimately believe that the world is on some level fair, and if he’s rich it must mean he got there fairly.

The other thing that I’d add to this is that, post-pandemic, a lot of people have felt the pinch of shifting economic realities. A lot of decisions from years and decades past that have masked the costs neoliberal policies and corporate cost cutting have come home to roost, and it has left people feeli g stressed out and resentful.

They feel their quality of life and standard of living starting to slip, and they see the injustice of the system supporting their bosses, their landlords, and their banks, but not them. And they see who’s currently at the wheel.

Because of this, they also grow increasingly resentful towards discussions of people who need help. They feel like no one is there to help them as the world shifts around them, and yet they have smug culture warriors telling them that they’re worse than Hiitler for not thinking of people they’ll never meet, half a world away.

Trump and Milhouse will not help them, but at least they will not tell them that they are not deserving. And that’s more than what they perceive Democrats, the Liberals, or the NDP doing for them.

The media, and the other parties, would have to actually tie Milhouse to Trump in some meaningful way for that to actually matter. People, genuinely, will not do that on their own.

And I don’t believe any institutions are going to do that, either, as it’s seen as generally impolite, and institutions of power care more about decorum than actually being a help to anyone.

Hey, I found a new litmus test of my own! Neat!

No one is arguing that they don’t have the legal right.

But they believe they have the moral right, and they do not.

Cool. Now, let’s start getting into whether communism is “extremism” or not, rather than just begging the question.

The current situation is consistent with the “carbon fighting” government that buys an oil pipeline. So, you know…

You are placing your annoyance at other peoples’ grammar above the desire to actually communicate with them, which means you’re just here to masturbate in public.

You get that, right?