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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Our parties are more left leaning than US ones, yeah. So the left-most leaning party, the NDP is the Bernies and AOCs. Just slightly to the right of them but not by much are the centre-left (some could argue centre, for Canada) Liberals aka US Dems but these are still left of the US Dems. Then you have the Conservatives who used to be centre right but they’re really flirting with being firmly right which is STILL to the left of the US Repubs. So yeah, we’re pretty left.

    Here’s a good breakdown someone wrote on the other site:

    There’s a Daily Show from back in the Stewart days when Harper’s Conservatives won the federal election in Canada. The line went something like:

    “Right wing parties are winning everywhere! In Canada, the Conservative Party, or as we’d know it here, the Gay Rainbow Alliance, has won their election.”

    If that gives you any idea.

    The NDP are mostly in-line with the further left of the Dems, but realistically, the Liberals are only slightly more towards the centre than them. The Conservatives are historically right of centre, but still left of most of the American center. That was largely true before the Progressive Conservatives failed, merged with the Reform party, and became the Conservative Party of Canada.

    That said, the Conservative parties have been moving further right in recent years. Some of this was because their supporters were generally finance, oil, large corporations, etc., so the policies they pushed forward were usually beneficial to them. But more recently they’ve been pursuing a lighter version of US-style populism. Mostly though, their platform for the past 3 leaders seems to be “aren’t you sick of Trudeau yet?” because they don’t have much substance in anything else they claim to support.



  • Yes thank you. It didn’t read as natural - that’s the word.

    It’s disheartening that one can’t disagree on this topic without being eaten alive. I’m not saying elect Donald Trump and the couchfucker or anything ffs. Plus, I’m Canadian - so probably more left leaning than any US Dem - and as I’ve expressed, I really want the US to get their shit together.

    I’ve done Toastmasters. I’m a writer for a living. I know how to give feedback on speeches. I also acknowledged that not every speech is received the same way by every viewer.

    I’m not even saying she’s bad - I’m just saying she could be GREAT with more practice. I don’t understand why this is a shocking thing to say.



  • There’s nothing holding her back from being a great speaker like Obama. She needs more time and practice to develop her skills further to get to that next level. And maybe a better speechwriter.

    I’m definitely a fan of hers, but felt that this could have been executed better. She did not have a lot of vocal variation and came out blazing fairly early on in the speech. Not going to rewatch it, but that was my perspective from last night. At one point I was like whoa Kimberly Guilfoyle, take it down a notch.

    I do understand the need to be angry but it’s much more impactful when vocal variation, pitch, tone and volume are employed more effectively to build toward the anger.



  • Hickling is a clinical psychologist from Albany, N.Y., who has studied the effects of fatal auto accidents on the drivers who survive them. He says these people are often judged with disproportionate harshness by the public, even when it was clearly an accident, and even when it was indisputably not their fault.

    Humans, Hickling said, have a fundamental need to create and maintain a narrative for their lives in which the universe is not implacable and heartless, that terrible things do not happen at random, and that catastrophe can be avoided if you are vigilant and responsible.

    In hyperthermia cases, he believes, the parents are demonized for much the same reasons. “We are vulnerable, but we don’t want to be reminded of that. We want to believe that the world is understandable and controllable and unthreatening, that if we follow the rules, we’ll be okay. So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us. We don’t want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters.”


  • From the Pulitzer article (please read it):

    Diamond is a professor of molecular physiology at the University of South Florida and a consultant to the veterans hospital in Tampa.[…]

    “Memory is a machine,” he says, “and it is not flawless. Our conscious mind prioritizes things by importance, but on a cellular level, our memory does not. If you’re capable of forgetting your cellphone, you are potentially capable of forgetting your child.”

    “The quality of prior parental care seems to be irrelevant,” he said. “The important factors that keep showing up involve a combination of stress, emotion, lack of sleep and change in routine, where the basal ganglia is trying to do what it’s supposed to do, and the conscious mind is too weakened to resist. What happens is that the memory circuits in a vulnerable hippocampus literally get overwritten, like with a computer program. Unless the memory circuit is rebooted – such as if the child cries, or, you know, if the wife mentions the child in the back – it can entirely disappear.”



  • There’s actually a great article on this. Warning, it’s a TOUGH read.

    Archive link

    What kind of person forgets a baby? The wealthy do, it turns out. And the poor, and the middle class. Parents of all ages and ethnicities do it. Mothers are just as likely to do it as fathers. It happens to the chronically absent-minded and to the fanatically organized, to the college-educated and to the marginally literate[…]

    Last year it happened three times in one day, the worst day so far in the worst year so far in a phenomenon that gives no sign of abating.

    The facts in each case differ a little, but always there is the terrible moment when the parent realizes what he or she has done, often through a phone call from a spouse or caregiver. This is followed by a frantic sprint to the car. What awaits there is the worst thing in the world.

    It’s a shockingly common occurrence and actually not due to neglect a lot of the time. The article posits that a large reason is because car seats were mandated to be moved to the back seat.