Right? This isn’t team sports…the conservatives losing is good…but the liberals winning isn’t.

We have to pay attention to what’s actually going on…which has been a continuous slide to the right since…and this is going to enrage Liberals…but since Mulroney who was the last Prime Minister (as abysmal as he was for his trade deals and social policy etc) who actually cared about using taxation as a tool to pay for things: like it or not the GST was good for Canada (broadly speaking, I would have much preferred the existing mechanisms been used, rather than an overlay added that was a pretext for the removal of corporate and luxury taxes).

“Had little problem passing their policies”? That ridiculous. We had a snap election because he didn’t want to pass their policies…got dragged kicking and screaming into watered down versions…and eventually had his government prematurely removed because he wouldn’t.

Carney is not passionate about the environment. He literally passed a bill that allows the private sector to ignore environmental regulation so they could build a pipeline, and he cancelled most of Trdueau’s environmental policy.

You don’t seem to understand they Carney is occupying the space Pollieve used to occupy, which forced Pierre to have even more extreme policy, and forced the NDP into oblivion because they abandoned their voters and tried to occupy the old Liberal space.

That’s not irony.

It also assumes I paid anything for this iPhone 7…which I didn’t.

But that argument is nonsense, anyways. Apparently you have to be a caveman or you can’t criticize anything? That would be pretty convenient for you.

Well, I did say “got to be”. Just an observation…I obviously don’t know if this was necessary or useful.

Got to be a symptom of end-stage capitalism.

Should be noted that his justification is a lunatic the CIA hired and then brought back from Afghanistan.

I mean…ya…but this “quote” doesn’t appear to me to be talking about the wealthy…but rather addressing the notion that poor people and the unemployed have no value if they don’t have employment/can’t find better employment.

Could be wrong.

We already knew this…because forced rehab has been tried. It’s barbaric, and it’s depressing that a “socialist” premier pulled the trigger.

I’m from London…back in the 80s it was a hotbed for these folks…but they did it indoors.

Non thing to disagree with here….reasonable and I agree.

Your last comment was talking about people eating rats and bug and living without healthcare…if that doesn’t describe a hellhole, I don’t know what does.

But in this comment you’ve changed gears and everything seems reasonable…and I’m on board.

Thank you very much for this response. I must admit, I’m in over my head when it comes to deep engagement on this issue. I have several friends in the regions I listed who are of middle to low socio-economic importance in their respective areas, and I keep in touch with them almost exclusively online.

I understand and appreciate your perspective and thank you very much for sharing it with me. I’ll definitely be considering it when I think about this in the future.

My eyes are so bad I can’t tell which way either of those words is spelled.

It’s dangerous to censor, certainly…but it’s also dangerous to base your opinion on YouTube videos that surely have their own agenda and lack of breadth.

China is neither the poverty void this article presents, nor is it the hellhole you’re suggesting it is. It’s also a fact that China raised the vast majority out of its citizens out of poverty…and used that boom to make it sustainable.

That’s not true. I mean…I’m sure you’re being hyperbolic, and there’s certainly discontent in a 1 party system…but I have some exposure to ordinary Chinese people as well as regular people in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and the sentiment is mixed, at worse.

Right…but you can’t swing from one extreme (zero poverty) to the other (hundreds of millions living like it’s the Great Depression). Neither are true.

It should be noted that poverty in China isn’t the same as poverty in the USA, ie when you adjust for wages v cost of living it doesn’t tell us much, because the systems are incompatible. All those people in China making below $1.90 US a day (or whatever your metric is) aren’t in the same boat they’d be in in the US, and vice versa.

But all of this ignores the topic of the post: China did indeed raise virtually all of its citizens out of poverty, and the US didn’t. But it’s really weird to just throw that factoid out there without acknowledging that China did it at the expense of the US.

China, in large part, raised people out of poverty at the expense of the so-called “west”…so it’s no mystery that the US was unable to do the same. The wests’ corporations needed cheap labour, and China was happy to accept the jobs. We all know this. Trump got elected because he was the first to overtly acknowledge that reality and propose a solution. Now, his “solution” will only exasperate the problem because he’s ultimately a corrupt fascist…but there’s a lesson there that hasn’t been learned yet.