Maybe I’m just a piece of shit, but I’m really tired of seeing so much money being spent outside of Canada, and to try to put women to work regardless of their individual preferences. I think women should be able to work, don’t get me wrong. But my wife wants to be a stay at home mom. She can’t afford to be. A big contributor to this reality is that the doubling of the labor force has been an enormous factor in stagnating wages. We went from mothers being able to raise their kids, and families being able to be financially stable on a single income, to the state subsidizing daycare so someone else can raise your kid while you provide labor.

Another issue I have here is the concern about tuberculosis rates. This is a huge can of worms, but the reserve system doesn’t work. I understand why it exists. I think the goals are understandable. But you can’t choose to live separately from Canadian society and then complain that we don’t provide you with good enough homes and healthcare. We all trade cultural cohesion to be a part of Canadian society. In return, we get better access to important resources and technology.

If you want Canadian healthcare and good housing, assimilate, get a job, live in a reasonably sized population center, and you’ll have those things. You don’t have to live in Toronto or Vancouver, but you do need to participate in the system that creates that value in the first place. You can’t just stay on your reserve, spending all your money on alcohol and drugs, and expect necessities to be provided to you based on white guilt. And yes, this is what life is like on a lot of reserves. They live in horrendous conditions. That’s why TB is so prevalent.

I am empathetic to the fact that these people are born into a world that is not stacked to help them succeed. I don’t think we help them by trying to enable the existence of reserves. One of my close colleagues came from one of these reserves, and she always says the best decision she ever made was to come to a city, get educated, and start a career. The rest of her family are back on the reserve, and they’re all alcoholics. Whereas she lives in a small town, has a house and car, and still gets to celebrate her culture with other indigenous people who live here.

We provide the most benefit to the most people by consolidating resources, not by reinforcing the fantasy that we can live in tiny communities on the fringe of society and still get all the benefits of modern society. Live together, or suffer alone.

I’m always amazed at how rarely the “go to uni and get a good job” angle is brought up in relation to our failing foundational industries in the west. We’ve been incentivizing people to focus on “escaping” the working class, rather than trying to find ways to make those jobs more appealing.

I work in healthcare. Treating student practitioners badly is the norm in a ton of places in this field. 60 hour work weeks are normalized, and wanting a good work-life balance gets you ostracized.

The worst part is that I had to compete to get into this job that treats me badly. My program only takes the top 20 applicants out of hundreds per year. The schooling is brutal, with midterm or final exams 2-3 times a week. This is possible because you are blowing through courses consecutively rather than in a semesterized system. Once you get to practical placement, you are treated like the workplace bitch, and you’re expected to do 2-3x the work of a paid worker for free. Actually, you’re paying tuition to be there, so it’s even worse.

Don’t get me wrong, some of the brutality is necessary. The rapid pace of learning makes it hard to forget anything. It’s a great way to pack knowledge into the brain. But I would never recommend my program to anyone. It was a horrible experience overall. My job is pretty great minus the ridiculous hours, so I’m glad I went. But if I could go back and tell my younger self to do something else, I would.

Did you actually do your research on that “deworming drug”? It’s been used to treat a hell of a lot more than parasites. That is just its most common use.

This has always been funny to me as someone who actually works in healthcare and regularly reads scientific studies. Of all the things you could choose to hate Trump over, the example you give is one that plenty of people in the scientific community considered to be a treatment avenue worth researching.

Damn, the media propaganda machine is effective. Trump could run into a burning building to save a litter of puppies and they’d still find a way to make everyone hate the guy. It’s impressive.

They probably would have just called you names instead of openly engaging with your ideas. That’s the norm in my experience. I sometimes wonder why I bother posting at all.

Then again, I do get some traction, and some representation of ideas outside the common narratives is better than none. But it does seem like if you aren’t in lockstep with the popular narratives, you get a cascade of downvotes just for entertaining unpopular ideas.

People don’t want you to think for yourself. They just want you to parrot their beliefs back to them and give them affirmation.

Who isn’t fascist/racist in the eyes of the left? You can be a moderate libertarian with a couple of populist beliefs and they’ll throw those labels at you.

Thanks for all you’ve done, I hope this place just keeps growing!

Shit, if all conservatives had that nice an ass I wouldn’t mind listening to their opinions.

We should be afraid of China. China is a superpower that doesn’t believe in our way of life. That doesn’t mean we should be afraid of Chinese Canadians, but we should still be wary. China is absolutely invested in swaying our political environment to their favor, and they’re willing to promote their interests by using migrants.

It’s an unfortunate reality that Chinese Canadians who are just going about their lives will see some collateral damage from our reactions to China’s meddling. We need to minimize this collateral as much as possible, but we are under genuine threat.

One thing we need to keep in mind is that Caucasian politicians can be bought just as easily, if not more so, as installing Chinese assets in our institutions.

I’m so glad I have a career where I’ll never have to worry about crap like this. I’d love to see how the higher ups would like it if they had to be on camera the whole day with AI watching them for mistakes/phone usage.

I want politics to be less polarized too, but the train is off the tracks. The majority of people don’t believe in compromise anymore. They believe they are right, and everyone else are communists/nazis who must be destroyed.

I’m a healthcare professional who believes in trans rights. I also think hormone treatments and gender affirming surgery should be illegal to give to minors. The left will say I’m transphobic. The right will say I shouldn’t support these interventions at any age.

The reality is that both sides are blinded by ideology. The left has become just as intolerant and aggressive as the right used to be. They believe gender affirmation is more important than allowing a patient’s body to develop in a healthy way with natural hormone levels. They believe hormone blockers or replacement therapy given to young people have no lasting side effects. They seem to be under the impression that it isn’t abnormal to fast-track patients to gender affirming care rather than trying to reduce dysphoria through therapy. But if you bring this up, even as an educated professional, you’re an evil bigot conspiracy theorist who hates trans people.

You can’t find a middle ground with people like this. They aren’t open to discussion, and they certainly don’t care to understand where you’re coming from. It’s their way or the highway.

Playing devil’s advocate only makes you look like an asshole if the person you’re talking to has a closed mind. The entire purpose is to bridge the gap between two sides in an argument by acknowledging the positives of something they disagree with.

In essence, if someone has to play devil’s advocate with you, you’re probably the asshole. Otherwise you would be able to relate to and understand people who disagree with you without treating them like a monster.

A good example of where this can help is in politics. Political discussion is full of people talking past each other instead of trying to understand each other. If you could understand each other, it would be much easier to find compromise, which would make everyone feel heard and lead to the most reasonable outcomes when you consider the voice of all parties. But it’s much easier to label your opponent an idiot or a devil than to grapple with their actual problems.

Do you believe they should receive immediate massive military aid? Because we’re basically in a Mexican stand off with Russia and China right now. As soon as we pass a line for what intervention Russia is willing to tolerate, we will start a cascade of events that will lead to WW3, and possible nuclear war. Most of us don’t want to see the planet nuked into extinction over a small war on the other side of the planet.

Granted, I think war is inevitable. But that doesn’t mean we should rush into it. The bloodshed will get exponentially worse the minute this war becomes bigger than Russia v Ukraine, and we’re already very close to the tipping point in my estimation.

Okay, sounds good. But then I don’t want to see you begging for food, shelter, healthcare, transportation, cell phones, internet, or anything else provided by people who work. If you don’t want to engage in this system of commerce, by all means, you do you. But if you aren’t trading your labor to buy goods from other people who are laboring, you don’t just get to have all your needs met for free.

Go live off the land, build your own shelter, grow/hunt your own food, and treat your own wounds. I wish you luck. I’d rather keep working and paying for a much better range of goods than you could ever scavenge or build on your own.

I’m not allowed to sleep at work, unfortunately.

No, he just won’t sell anything to you unless you’re LGBT yourself or an extremely vocal ally. Then he’ll go destroy the other tills, because you’re not allowed to exist unless you are a part of his movement.

Actually, I’m bisexual, and just for writing this comment I’ll be drowned out by downvotes. Even being one of the letters doesn’t make you safe XD.