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That's right. You like the fact that you didn't get sent down into the coal mines at age 6, or mangled in a factory machine as a little kid and then get thrown out on the street with 3 limbs and zero money? Thank a liberal. You like the idea of weekends off? Social Security? Cleaner air and water? Workplace rights? FMLA? Anti-discrimination protections? What few tattered remains of the social safety net still exist despite your best (worst) efforts to dismantle them? Thank a liberal.

The bitter irony of you MAGA morons is that the vast majority of you would have ended up as disposable grist for heavy industry as children if it weren't for the efforts of the very people you hiss and screech and spew venom at. You owe liberals goddamn near every good thing you have, and you're feeling outraged and nauseated reading this because some part of you knows it's true. You've pickled your brains in so much stupid, shortsighted hate you don't even understand whose shoulders you're standing on any longer. Spoiler alert: it's liberals' shoulders.

So go ahead, enjoy your holiday, as all Americans should do. But think a little. Think about how and why you're still alive and why you enjoy a standard of living better than "Dickensian nightmare." Because I have news for you: the titans of industry who thought in the 19th century like you think now would never, ever have allowed it to you. The only reason you are anything better than a modern-day slave is centuries of people with better morals and more humanity than you thinking of people other than themselves and saying "No, this is wrong. NO ONE should suffer this."

That, in a nutshell, is the difference between liberal and "conservative" (read: reactionary) political worldviews. The conservative says "It's not happening to me, so I don't care." The liberal says "It shouldn't happen to *anyone,* which is why I care." Be glad that caring extended to you and your ancestors...and don't push your luck. If we stop caring, you're going to get exactly what you wished for, and you're not going to like it.

Tolerance Is Not A Moral Precept.

This is a thorough once-over giving the lie to the "conservatives'" self-serving bullshit squealing that "Butbutbutbutbut if you don't tolerate my intolerance you're a hypocrite!" The short version, as put forth in the article, is this: tolerance is a peace treaty, not a suicide pact.

Put another way, it's social technology, just like laws. It allows us, in an ever-more-connected global society, to exist and function. Like a treaty it covers those, and only those, who are party to it.

This means that if you're a genocidal fucking psychopath then no, Virginia, we do not have to "tolerate" your unhinged ramblings. You are cancer in the body politic. You have gleefully ripped your human card to shreds and dropped the pieces in an incinerator, cackling like a hyena on PCP at how you have "owned the libs." You have placed yourselves outside the treaty. We are not obligated to put up with your shit.

tl;dr: if you can't behave like a civilized human being, don't be surprised when you get treated like a rabid animal. Read and be better, or don't, it's your choice, but don't bitch when you get your find-outs.

No, I haven't emigrated yet, but I've used this weekend to book a cheap hotel in St. Catharines and zip around southern Ontario on their incredibly awesome Go Transit system. I saw some of Burlington, a little of Missisauga at the bus terminal, *all* of Hamilton along both King and Main streets--twice!--and got to visit Thorold today on the St. Catharines local lines.

This entire place, so far, has been a revelation. It feels completely different from everywhere I've been in the US, and in almost every single way, it feels better. A lot better. The one downside I think is that money doesn't go quite as far for most things here, though with the inflation issues in the US everyday food actually costs *less* here, which is something I was pleasantly surprised by. This is despite the higher price tags - the raw numbers are vertiginous, but multiply by ~.75 to get the price in USD. Eating out is another story - I just paid $17 for my one and only meal out, an admittedly gigantic mission-style burrito. Then again that's about USD$12.50, so still not awful. Just testing a similar order against a Chipotle in Buffalo comes to well over $12 and I suspect it's a smaller burrito so yeah.

Then there's the Bulk Barn. Steel cut oats, my go-to, are $3.50 (remember, ~$2.80 USD) for *a kilogram.* I can get an entire month plus of oats for way, way less than the cost of that burrito above. Parboiled rice is $5.90 (~$4.50 USD) a kilogram. Hard whole wheat flour is just over $5/kg. Both green and red gram (lentils) are $4/kg. Even veggies are cheaper here! Carrots appear to be about $2.25/kg for example.

What I notice most is that "working poor" goes a lot further here than in the US. Even the notionally low-end grocery stores like Food Basics look like Christmas came early to me. The selection is incredibly huge, there are plain-label generics -- often literally called "no name" -- that are just as good, and there's a much healthier spread overall. Zehr's, which is apparently only considered mid-end, looks like something out of the sort of dream I might have after 2 weeks on a starvation diet.

The transit, as mentioned, is amazingly good: buses come every hour at worst, usually every half-hour, and they all seem to be coordinating with one another so that waiting for transfers doesn't take very long at all. The fares are expensive, $3 here and $3.25 in Hamilton (but remember, $2.25 and ~$2.50 in US money!), but they have 10-ride cards, day passes, monthly passes, and transfers good for 2 hours at minimum for unlimited rides. St. Catharines is not a large city, so that effectively $2.25 fare would let me get anywhere and possibly back.

This place is also amazingly clean. There are segmented trash/recycle bins everywhere, and people actually use them properly. There's very little plastic waste, almost all the paper packaging is recycled kraft paper, and most places straight up don't have plastic bags, or even bags at all. This is definitely a BYOB nation and I am all for it.

Somewhat surprisingly, if I take the worst-case scenario of making CAD$16/hr ($32000/yr gross) up here as a pharmacy assistant, the position that most closely matches the US definition of "pharmacy tech," my tax burden is slightly *lower* than it would be in the US! And I'd get actual services, like healthcare, for that tax, so the real number for takehome pay is going to be around $1500 higher per year when considering that I won't need health insurance any longer. Apparently, while certain powerful people are trying their damndest to turn Canada into "USA 2.0 with a side of Timbits," enough people are awake (for now...) to stave it off for at least while.

The major problem is rent. Apparently, just 5 years ago, a decent 1 bedroom would have been under $1000, all-inclusive. Now? Good luck getting a bachelor(ette) for that, *without* heat and hydro thrown in. For this reason I am very likely going to attempt to land in, in this order, Thorold, Niagara Falls, and Fort Erie rather than any of the larger cities, though Hamilton still has some decent pricing in areas that Canadians consider bad neighborhoods...which, of course, I consider a vacation spot. There definitely are some parts of Hamilton even I wouldn't rent in, but very few, and they're all in the small gap between about 400-800 Main Street East and its nearby E/W corridors. Rent definitely does worry me, as apparently it's almost doubled over the last 10 years all over Ontario, but my girlfriend and I live simply and don't spend much other than the basics.

So what's next? Well, turns out the PTCB credential doesn't transfer across borders, but the good news is that 1) there are PA courses, 2) they are available online and I can take them in the US, 3) they are not very long at all -- 34 weeks but "self-directed," and 4) the whole shebang will cost me less than $4,000 US. Unfortunately the next set of these at George Brown doesn't start matriculation until July, though I haven't looked into McMaster or Niagara College yet, so it will likely be a while before I get the cert. Then, of course, I'd need a work permit and to find housing. And then, it goes without saying, I'd want to become a legal permanent resident ASAP, and hopefully a citizen once the 5-year period is over.

Wish me luck. I may be too late, or I may not have enough money, but I'm damn sure going to try.

...because the Law of Unintended Consequences is a biiiiiiiiitch.

Josh Hawley said the quiet part loud, AGAIN, when he opined that today's ruling would strengthen Republican presence in the electoral college, because by his logic, pro-choice people in red states would move elsewhere. Except...hey, asshole, do you think they wouldn't have already if they could have?! No, what this is going to do is produce very large blocks of very poor people who have a very obvious and well-known set of villains to blame for their misery. This, in other words, is a recipe for turning red states blue, NOT vice-versa. I am looking forward to the collective freakout when this moron realizes he's forbidden people from, essentially, aborting future Democrats :)

Exhibit B: Justice Clarence ("Uncle [Ruckus]") Thomas sees today's destruction of Roe vs. Wade as the thin end of the wedge to dismantling other recent rulings like marriage equality, and even not-so-recent ones like access to contraception. In other words, this is the full-steam-ahead signal for the hideous theocracy the Birchers and their ilk want to implement. This wholesale slaughter of precedent, however, is...let's say, extremely inadvisable. Why?

Simple: Loving vs. Virginina. Brown vs. Board of Ed. Hell, Plessy vs Ferguson! Maybe we can save time and money by trying these cases "separately but equally," hmm...? If Thomas really believes that his white colleagues won't throw him under the bus the instant it becomes convenient and he's no longer needed, he's an even bigger fool than I thought he was, and I already thought he was such a gigantic fool that he visibly bends light around himself with the sheer density of his malignant judicial incompetence.

Karma is a bitch. Don't say you've not been warned.

I had an idea earlier today: why not just...*give* all the racists and white supremacists and various other pants-pissing demographic whiners the ethnostate they want so much?

Let's take some shithole state in the middle of the US that's already whiter than the inside of a jar of mayonnaise in the middle of a blizzard -- I'm thinking Wyoming, for preference -- and just...cut it off from the rest of the lower 48 politically. Let all the Ku Kucks Klanners and their ilk move in, free of charge. We can call it "White-oming" if they want.

Build a wall around it (and make them pay for it). No one leaves, because why would they want to? Only white people can enter, so no more, for example, Latina housekeepers. White people will be the entire society in there. No more paying taxes to, or getting ANY sort of aid FROM, the fed.gov. We can even let them secede if they want to; we can change the US flag to have 49 stars and a single burning cross on it.

Thoughts? Seems like the most efficient way to give everyone what they want. All the sheet fetishists get their much-ballyhooed white ethnostate, and the rest of the country gets their poisonous influence removed from politics so we can concentrate on civilizing ourselves.

I'm surprised no one's thought of this yet, actually.

Logically speaking, a single man can cause a lot more pregnancies than a single woman can carry to term. The vast, vast majority of rape is also committed by men against women. The best way to avoid abortion is to avoid pregnancy in the first place.

Sooooo...my proposal is mandatory vasectomies for every American male at or over the age of 12, to be reversed when said males are capable of supporting a family and have proven themselves stable and financially solvent. We should of course freeze a sperm sample in case the vasectomy reversal process runs into trouble, we're not monsters here, but if we're really serious about preventing abortion, we should -- pardon the turn of phrase here -- cut the problem off at the root.

As it were.

Thoughts? You have to admit this would be stunningly, supremely effective in cutting down unwanted pregnancies. And as long as we're ignoring bodily autonomy and medical privacy, why not? Now hold still and let me go find the scissors, boys, 'cause this is gonna hurt you a lot more than it's gonna hurt me :)

Yes, you heard me, the resident lesbian threw a homophobic slur. Little-known secret? Team Fag and Team Dyke do NOT get along. Why should we? Men are still men, even if they like other men. And that comes with allllll the same stupid, self-destructive baggage just being a man implies.

Now, down to business: fascism, and the associated LARPing, has replaced football and even pro-wrestling as the single faggiest pastime in the entire US of A. All the performative homophobia is just that: *performative.* I've never seen a bigger bunch of self-loathing pig bottoms trying to sublimate their man-lust in ammosexuality, gun-worship, male-only spaces, casual misogyny, you name it.

Even the central fascist tendency to gather around and worship a so-called "strongman" leader speaks to this. You don't even need the spiffy uniforms (remember where Hugo Boss started, please). It's men who recognize and hate their own latent homosexuality turning that resentment outward on the rest of the world, plain and simple. You're too scared to admit you want to suck cock, so you suck guns. You don't have the guts to attend some kink club and find a leather daddy, so you want your entire political life dominated by a hard, ruthless sociopath who gives you what you need, indeed, what you insist you deserve. Which is fine, but leave the rest of us out of it!

In case you are wondering, yes, this is a callout. The first person who comes to mind is local ammosexual Runaway of course, whose incessant leaks about the sorry state of his family scream "closeted peter puffer" in giant neon letters the size of the Chrysler building. But there's plenty of others in here too: the "libertarians," the "former liberals," the incels, the "red-pilled," and the list goes on. I have no idea why spaces like SN inevitably become a love nest (hate nest?) for this kind of dysfunctional secret sausage-sitter, but there you go.

Now will you fucking lunatics please stop trying to destroy civilization and just go out and get laid already?!

At this point, the GOP is very literally running a cult of human sacrifice. Ol' Governor DeathSentence in FL (and Abbatoir in TX) are the most egregious examples, but the GOP in general is perfectly willing to sacrifice their constituents--to Covid, to poverty, to violence, to plain old deaths of despair--in the name of keeping the status quo and their own power.

I don't even really think this is new; really, all that's different about it is the state of politics and discourse has sunken so low thanks to 40+ years of Reaganomics and the attendant spiritual and social decay that came along with it that we've reached a point where the carefully-crafted euphemisms the party uses for plausible deniability of its true intentions have been abandoned. And what THAT means is that the GOP's base is now the formerly-reviled "fringe," the ones the party insiders and elites used to court but secretly talk shit about behind their backs. Those euphemisms, all the "states' rights" and "personal responsibility" and "protecting the unborn," were only there to keep the ones who still had some sliver of a conscience from coming face to face with what the party actually intends and stands for.

Well, no more: that shit's "mainstream" for the GOP now, and there's going to be wailing and gnashing of teeth among the Romney types that they made a mistake. What the fuck did they expect? The bitter irony is that these comparatively "sane" Republicans--by which I mean the ones not quite pozzed enough by the cyanide-laced Flavor-ade to forget that their stock portfolios mean shit if the country collapses--are going to be the first ones attacked and taken down by the fanatical majority of their party. Serves 'em right. They will find they can't buy their way out of Hell.

People, if you are not on the bus, you are under the bus. Trump let that slip a bit with his "I love the uneducated!" comment (and his constituency just proved his point for him!). Anyone voting Republican is somewhere between useful idiot and traitor at this point. This is what your masters think of you, and they feel no need even to pretend to hide it any longer. Your children, your parents, your jobs, your livelihoods, your health, all of it is nothing to them. You are cheap labor and then you're trash.

Don't say you weren't warned.

So-called conservatives (they are no such thing, they're destructive reactionary radicals) in this country seem almost mystifying if you try and analyze their words, actions, and the concordance between them. It's easy to look at what a self-defeating Ouroboros they've made of themselves and throw up your hands and go "they're fucking nuts, don't even bother."

Thing is, though, this is a case of overanalysis. Number one, they're not crazy, they're evil. And number two, they're much simpler to understand than most people think, precisely because they *don't* think. Briefly, all "conservative" "thought" can be broken down to 2 processes:

1) The purpose of the law is to restrict but not protect the outgroup, and to protect but not restrict the ingroup/tribe. The law is not and never was about equality. You may lie and cheat in any way necessary to ensure that this is so.

2) Every accusation a "conservative" makes is either projection, confession, or both. That is, when a "conservative" starts shrieking about "those damn liberals doing X!" what it means is that X is something said "conservative:" 1) is doing, 2) wishes to do, 3) has done, and/or 4) is planning to do. Voter fraud? Yes, the GOP does it. Yes, the GOP did it. "Killing babies?" Yyyyyyeah, look at what states and what parties fall where on the idea of social safety nets.

Point 2 also ties back into point 1 in that the GOP as an institution and its "conservative" constituency do not demand accountability of their own, only their opponents. Their outrage over any given scandal stems purely from tribalism: "Only MY tribe can do that! When someone else does it it's wrong!"

Is this a little overbroad? Maybe, but it's close enough that it explains well over 90 or 95% of "conservative" (mis)behavior in my estimation. I used to be very wary of trying to generalize and stereotype like this, but like Angelica Pickles said, "if the shoe hurts, wear it." Keep these two truths in mind and basically everything the GOP and its voters say and do begins to make a twisted, horrifying kind of sense, in that "it's not at all logical but in context it makes sense."

Logged into IRC to this message:

[2021-07-20 | 11:22:29 UTC] You have a message from Bytram: I've said it before, and I believe I even mentioned it in a story, that I would not object posts like this being modded as spam: https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=43972&page=1&cid=1158137#commentwrap

So it's official. Anyone spamming contentless bullshit like that? Spam-mod them out of existence. No, you special snowflakes, that's not "censorship" any more than telling someone to clean up after their dog is a violation of their freedom of association.