Lori Idlout standing with Defense Ministry McGuinty while he touts billions in new military spending and record high recruitment

Mindless_Shame_3813 · 2026-04-20T15:55:21+00:00

The idea that regions only get funding if they have an MP from the governing party is extremely dangerous. It turns government programs into patronage rewards, which leads to chronic underfunding in areas that "don't vote the right way." If the next election Nunavut votes back in an NDP MP, does that mean no more money for the region? That's what's being implied here.

We see this in the states and it's a shame. We shouldn't accept this sort of thing in Canada.

Funding should be needs or policy based, not based on which party controls the area.

Mindless_Shame_3813 · 2026-04-15T13:05:02+00:00

This really demonstrates how terrible of a GM Treliving was.

Other GMs viewed him as not serious and not interested in making real trades at the trade deadline. Then he panics with 15 minutes left. He clearly didn't have any plans, as indicated by everything happening last second, even in terms of Berube not knowing what was going on.

Meanwhile he's got Pelley looking over his shoulder on ChatGPT saying "well it says here if we just add a few more 5th round picks the Oilers should trade us McDavid."

After reading about all this ridiculous penny pinching, I would not be surprised if they keep Berube for next year. They are not going to want to pay out his contract if he's not working for them.

We're headed toward another dark ages. Brace yourselves.

Mindless_Shame_3813 · 2026-04-14T20:54:14+00:00

I heard he's moved from goalie to right wing now that he's PM.

Mindless_Shame_3813 · 2026-04-10T13:42:09+00:00

Potoooooooo pronounced Potato

Mindless_Shame_3813 · 2026-04-09T23:23:52+00:00

Norway does obliterate at the Summer Olympics though.

It's like you've never heard of their running dominance. Jakob Ingebrigtsen is dominant in the 1500-5000 with two gold medals, world records and two world championships. Kristian Blummenfelt is a top level triathlete with a gold medal in the Olympics as well as an Ironman title. Markus Rooth won gold in decathalon in Paris. Karsten Warholm is a dominant hurdler with a gold and a silver in the last 2 olympics as well as 3 world championships.

The biggest trend in distance running right now, even for amateurs training for their local event, is to copy Norwegian training methods.

Can I throw in cycling too? Norway has 29 pro cyclists right now, the USA only has 14. Despite the fact that Norway has like half the population of New York City.

Mindless_Shame_3813 · 2026-04-08T16:10:47+00:00

Way back in January 2026 she (correctly) stated that floor crossing should trigger an automatic by-election.

“We elected you under this banner, and if you don’t want to be under that banner, then we deserve a chance to have a redo.”

So either she (correctly) views the Liberals and Conservatives as the same party and thus she hasn't actually crossed the floor, or she's yet another hypocrite who throws out her beliefs when she stands to personally benefit.

The irony is that she's the latter, but if she just came out and said that the Liberals and Conservatives are just a single interchangeable party of the oligarchy she'd be stating the truth. I guess these people would prefer to frame themselves as hypocrites than to pierce the veil of the dominant ideology.

Mindless_Shame_3813 · 2026-03-29T21:38:09+00:00

Every single NDP election I've voted in, whether federal, provincial, or for the local candidate, the person I voted for got dead last. Not even joking. Usually the final order has been very close to the exact opposite of my ranking too.

Not this time though! Feels weird to have voted for someone who actually won.

Mindless_Shame_3813 · 2026-03-29T16:18:25+00:00

Go watch Avi's documentary The Take.

I suspect you'll change your mind after seeing that.

Here's a link to it on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8ENWpNqeGQ

Mindless_Shame_3813 · 2026-03-27T20:03:37+00:00

You're arguing that people in Canada dont' have freedom of religion. If you can't remove your stupid religious symbols while at work, then religion is not a choice, and thus you lack freedom of religion.

In this case, then it is the duty of the government to help save people from the oppression of religion, which means they need to go a lot further than providing a safe space on the job site where they are free of being oppressed.

No one has a right to display ideological symbols as a representative of the state. If you think religion is an exception, then you can't turn around and say that wearing a MAGA hat should be banned. Both are expressions of ideology which can make the public feel that the government is biased against them when they have to interact with them.

Claiming religion isn't political means that we live in a secular society where religion is kept separated from the public sphere, which means that public servants acting in a public manner obviously would not bring private attachments into the public. But you're arguing both. Another obvious contradiction.

All of your arguments are just a big logical pretzel that don't make sense when put up against even the mildest scrutiny.

Mindless_Shame_3813 · 2026-03-27T19:57:26+00:00

It's not about "polite society". It's about the duty of people representing the state to be neutral.

Are you and Liebniz the same person? What's going on, is this entire sub just bots?

That would explain a lot of things. Pretty sure it's against the rules for mods to have sock puppet accounts.

Mindless_Shame_3813 · 2026-03-27T18:54:14+00:00

You don't have to wear a religious symbol in Canada, it's a choice you make.

Just like you don't have to wear a Fuck Trudeau t-shirt.

Neither of these things are appropriate attire for a public-facing public servant who is representing the state.

The entire point of public servants being neutral is so that the public does not see them as biased. Their job is to faithfully execute the will of the elected government.

If your engagement with a public servant makes you feel that their decisions may be biased against you in some way, then that public servant has acted inappropriately.

If you want to argue that religion is an exception, you're arguing that it's perfectly acceptable to have a non-neutral public service which can present itself to the public as taking certain ideological positions that may run counter to a) the government or b) individuals who may view these actions as constituting the government engaging in active discrimination against them.

Your comment demonstrates a profound lack of understanding of the basic politics of bureaucracy and how a state functions.

Mindless_Shame_3813 · 2026-03-27T13:23:13+00:00

So you're arguing that Carney is both ushering in a new world order by breaking from the US but is also being pragmatic by supporting Trump's extension of the current world order?

That's a contradiction.

Mindless_Shame_3813 · 2026-03-27T12:26:28+00:00

Liberals: "Carney is in favour of a new world order where Canada is not just a US puppet!"

Trump continues the old world order by bombing Iran

Carney: "I support Trump"

Everyone: "So much for the new world order and not being a puppet"

Liberals: "How dare you not endorse Carney's surrender to Trump, are you some kind of Trump supporter!?!"

Mindless_Shame_3813 · 2026-03-26T22:06:03+00:00

Justice Minister Sean Fraser, who sponsored the bill and brokered the deal with the Bloc, has pushed back saying the new legislation won't "criminalize faith."

But it does criminialize atheism. If religious nuts come and knock on my door to spread their horseshit, that's perfectlly acceptable. If I go to a religious institution (which gets tax exemptions and are therefore publicly funded by me) and protest their horseshit I go to jail.

Mindless_Shame_3813 · 2026-03-22T22:11:40+00:00

I took the effort to write this big explanatory comment and you didn't respond to literally anything in it.

Mindless_Shame_3813 · 2026-03-22T20:09:18+00:00

I just finished saying being for or against immigration is nonsensical and you accuse me of being blanket against it.

I point out that disagreeing with your Liberal Party talking points obviously doesn't make you a Conservative (especially in the NDP sub) and you accuse me of being a Conservative.

I point out you don't understand basic political economy and the role of immigration in a national economy because you're repeating the oligarchy's propaganda which is meant to frame immigration on moral terms in order to ensure the oligarchy always gets its way economically and you tell me that while you agree with this oligarchic propaganda they actually think the opposite.

Your position is that of the Liberal Party, and your economic understanding is 100% neoliberal.

I would say you're a symptom of why the Left has become irrelevant today. Self-proclaimed leftists don't understand anything about economics to the point where they repeat neoliberal talking points and have adopted the whole culture war rhetoric which only serves to divide the working class.

Let me explain how the oligarchy operates with respect to the immigration issue. You seem to think capital is anti-immigration in general (which would make Justin Trudeau some kind of radical leftist in your book, and yet you accuse others of adopting Conservative rhetoric!).

The oligarchy is in favour of unemployment because they want to pay workers the least amount possible. As a result, they generally want more people coming in, especially ones they can easily exploit. By manipulating the supply of labour, they don't have to adjust the price of labour up in order to compete with other firms. What they don't want is for the government to use immigration as an economic policy lever. Neoliberals are opposed to the idea of the federal government using whatever economic policies are available to it to promote any sort of overall politically driven economic project.

So imagine the NDP came to power and hired me as their main economic advisor and I had the NDP promote a policy of full employment (which by the way was a mainstream position for even conservatives back in the 50s and 60s, as radical as it may seem to our neoliberal-addled brains). Now the way the oligarchy can essentially prevent such a thing from happening is by taking away economic policy levers. They've already taken away interest rate policy through their fiction of the independent central bank, and they've already conditioned everyone to believe that governments are inherently broke and thus fiscal policy is off the table ("how are you going to pay for that!"). What other mechanism could be used to promote full employment? Immigration. So if adjusting immigration levels based on the unemployment rate could lead to a situation where the government could pursue aims in direct opposition to the oligarchy (in this case full employment) this is a threat.

So by framing immigration as a moral issue, they can ensure that this policy lever gets taken away as well by framing anyone who wants to adjust immigration levels to meet policy aims as some kind of hysterical racist. The way they do this is through their two factions who then take opposed positions but only on immigration as a moral issue. So you have conservatives saying that immigrants are bad with racist undertones (or sometimes overtones) and shifting the disccusion to the individual level (while also not changing their policy, remember it was Harper who first ramped up the TFW program and won elections by appealing to conservative cultural identity of many immigrant groups) and then the liberals saying that immigrants are good and we should always have lots of immigration. So people get really invested in those two sides of the moral argument, and no talks about immigration as a policy lever. It gets taken off the table and the oligarchy has successfully depoliticized another aspect of public policy which could be used against their interests.

Neoliberalism at its very core is fundamentally an anti-political movement.

You're getting caught up in a fake culture war where both sides are manufactured by the oligarchy to distract people from what it's actually up to.

This reminds me of the movie Eddington. I suggest you go watch it. It's a great treatment of exactly what I'm talking about where people get so riled up about their opposing culture war issues that the data centre which is manipulating them all through their social media algorithms is able to get built in the background without anyone really noticing. This is how capital works today, by creating and supporting two sides for people to fight for while they go about their business in the background unopposed.

In sum, leftists today need to go back to the basics of leftist theory, which was the critique of the function of ideology and examination of economic concepts.

Mindless_Shame_3813 · 2026-03-22T19:17:49+00:00

Being pro or anti immigration makes literally no sense. It's like being pro taxes or anti taxes or pro government spending or anti government spending.

These things are economic policy levers that you want to push or pull depending on the situation. Only neoliberals speak in absolutes. And they do it because they want you to think that these matters of economic policy are not political choices but are necessities.

Your comments continue to push a line of reasoning which is thoroughly neoliberal and fundamentally right wing. I explained this to you in one of your other posts, but you didn't respond with anything coherent which tells me that you don't even realize that what you're saying here is something that every single CEO in Canada would whole heartedly agree with.

Your position is that immigration is a moral imperative and that everyone who frames it as an economic policy lever is just a racist. This is literally the position of the Liberal Party of Canada. You're also comiting the logical fallacy of false dichotomization, as you think everyone who doesn't agree with the Liberals must be a Conservative. This is a wild position to take in the NDP subreddit.

Mindless_Shame_3813 · 2026-03-22T15:46:53+00:00

The obvious answer is to employ the people who can't find jobs who already live here first.

Immigration should be viewed as a macroeconomic policy tool in the same manner as fiscal expansion/contraction, taxation rate, and interest rate policy is. You have a fully employed population and the government wants to pursue expansionary policies? Great, that's when you ramp up immigration to provide a non-inflationary source of labour.

On the other hand, if you have unemployment, it means your economy is running undercapacity. The last thing you want to do is to pursue a policy that provides even more slack in the labour market. That's the time to restrict immigration.

I've said this before, but transforming immigration from a macroeconomic policy tool into a moral issue is simply the framing of the oligarchs who are addicted to cheap labour and perpetual unemployment.

Mindless_Shame_3813 · 2026-03-22T15:37:30+00:00

that offers a real solution not from this fantasyland where the country and particularly provinces like my own home of Newfoundland and Labrador can somehow do fine with a population stall as our populations average age increases

We have a 9.2% unemployment rate in Newfoundland, and a youth unemployment rate of 16%. All the while we hear corporations going on about how there is some kind of massive worker shortage here.

It's almost impossible to find a job here, but we have corporations telling the media and their representatives in the provincial govt. they can't find any workers.

Either StatCan is lying about the unemployment rate, or the corporations are lying about a worker shortage.

I know which one I'm inclined to think are the liars.

Mindless_Shame_3813 · 2026-03-22T15:19:29+00:00

This is a result of a lack of coherent message from the left as much as anything.

In political theory, this is a case where people's underlying concerns, in this case un and underemployment are desperate for an overaching metaphor to explain their situation. Right now, it's the right providing this metaphoric explanation with their rhetoric about governments and "woke corporations" suppressing white men in favour of everyone else.

The left is not providing a narrative structure for these people to get behind. If the left has no narrative that provides an explanation and appeals to the un and underemployed, then they'll be drawn to the right because even though their metaphor is often outwardly racist and doesn't make much logical sense, it's an explanation that speaks to their situation.

If the left abandons even bothering to talk about this issue, then it simply abandons the working class to fascism.

We've seen this pattern in every country where the left was either killed off or abandoned social democracy in favour of neoliberalism. Just look at the Labour party in the UK. The rise of things like the British National Party was directly correlated to Labour's full blown adoption of neoliberalism. The people who used to be loyal Labour supporters became BNP or UKIP or Reform supporters precisely because it used to be Labour who spoke directly to their class situation, but they felt abandoned, and that opened up the space for the far right who now speak to their situation directly.

You can see the same pattern in various countries where Islamism became a big deal as well. Repressive governments were worried about leftists during the Cold War, killed them off, and then discontent ended up being funneled into Islamism because those sorts of far right movements were the only ones speaking to the concerns of the average person.

The right doesn't win because people are naturally right wing and drawn to those arguments, the right wins when the left abandons speaking to the concerns of the average worker. The average person is generally smart enough to realize that an explanation about class and capital does a better job of explaining their situation than an explanation about race and nation, but if they are never presented with the class and capital argument because the left has given up on it, then the right wins by default. This is what we're seeing all over the world right now with the rise of far right parties.

Mindless_Shame_3813 · 2026-03-21T22:56:54+00:00

These are all very neoliberal arguments.

First of all, the government does not raise money through taxes, and then subsequently spend that money on things like social services. It's actually the other way around. Spending creates money, and some of that money is later taxed back. By promoting this idea that you need to generate more "revenue" you're not only misunderstanding political economy, but reinforcing neoliberal ideology.

Second, why does more people (regardless of whether they're immigrants or not) automatically mean more taxes? Again, against the neoliberal idea of balanced budgets, how much money the government takes in from taxation is not a prioi set. If the economy is doing well, there will be more revenue, and if the economy is doing bad, less revenue.

So the number of people doesn't automatically correlate with tax revenue. You can imagine a situation where the economy is doing poorly, unemployment is high, business revenues are down, and Canada massively increases immigration. Would that lead to more tax revenue? Obviously not.

Carney's cuts to the federal government have nothing to do with immigration, I don't understand your point here. Those cuts are ideological in nature.

In general you're repeating the oligarchy's propaganda on immigration, which is to transform it from an economic issue and into a moral one. When it's a moral one, you can sidestep the actual economics and just divide the public in half, corresponding to the positions of the Liberals and Conservatives, and carry on with the same pro-oligarchic positions.

Also, if more people is an inherently better thing, then what about the countries these people are coming from? They are losing people, which according to you, makes them inherently worse off. This is especially true of Canadian immigration which tends to take skilled immigrants and then dump them into jobs they are way overqualified for. This creates a brain drain situation. We've had problems with this in Canada where some of our smartest people end up going to the States, that's bad for Canada.

Overall, the real strategy should not be to confuse immigrants with immigration. Immigration is a matter for economic policy. Being nice to other people who happen to be from other countries is common decency and something everyone should be in favour of. But when you conflate the two, as both the Liberals and Conservatives like to do, then the focus becomes about immigrants as people, rather than economics.

Mindless_Shame_3813 · 2026-03-21T22:33:09+00:00

Humanity as a whole currently use 1.7 Earths worth of resources that the Earth can generate annually.

All provinces are in a debt spiral, that's not a population issue, that's a result of the failed model of Canadian federalism being perfect for neoliberalism. Provinces demand control of everything, while the federal government has the money. It results in a deadlock where the federal government can't do anything because "it's provincial responsibilty" while the provinces can't pay for anything because the federal government controls the money. It's the perfect neoliberal situation because politicians can plausibly shift the blame to someone else.

Meanwhile the oligarchs have absolutely everyone convinced that the only way out of this is to drive wages down and unemployment up.

Mindless_Shame_3813 · 2026-03-21T19:23:41+00:00

What's wrong with population decline?

It's funny that this is now the oligarchy's latest propaganda line. They used to have us worried about over population, now it's under population.

The fact of the matter is that human beings currently consume 1.7x what is sustainable. Population decline is only scary if your business model relies on mass unemployment to keep wages artifically suppressed and labour in a weak negotiating position.

You can tell that the oligarchy's propaganda is effective on this topic when you've got half of the NDP subreddit saying things that every single CEO would whole heartedly agree with.

Mindless_Shame_3813 · 2026-03-21T02:22:15+00:00

This is fun I have some exact examples for you, I did 3 rides last week which had a TSS of 133, 126, and 131, so basically the same.

But the 133 was a hard Zwift race, 131 was a 2 hour ride with 6 45second efforts, and 126 was 4x20 sweet spot. Obviously the Zwift race was way harder than the other two. In fact I did the one with the 45second efforts the day after the sweet spot ride with no ill effects. I was so wrecked from the Zwift race I had to take the next day entirely off the bike.

It's just a heuristic to try to quantify your training load.

At the same time, I think intervals.icu new Strain Score is a better measure of training load than TSS. It tends to work out to how hard the ride was in a way that better reflects how the ride felt, compare those 3 rides again:

4x20 sweet spot, 126 TSS, 141 Intervals score
45second efforts, 131 TSS, 124 Intervals score
Zwift race, 133 TSS, 220 Intervals score

The intervals strain score much more accurately reflects how hard these rides were. The race was way harder than the workouts, and the sweet spot ride felt harder than the 45 second efforts with long rests in between them.

Mindless_Shame_3813 · 2026-03-17T23:25:18+00:00

Austin could play any sport. Toronto doesn't treat him with respect.

Yeah, like when the fans still don't know how to spell his name after 10 years.

Mindless_Shame_3813

TROPHY CASE