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.

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.

As much as Canadians like to believe conservatives and moderates don’t exist up here, we actually do. You don’t even have to be right wing to oppose the LGBT conglomerate.

I’m a bisexual, socially liberal moderate who doesn’t like LGBT politics. It’s got nothing to do with being religious. In fact, it’s the way the LGBT ideology resembles a religion that I have the biggest problem with. They have their sacred idols, their dogma, and their blasphemies. They ignore science that disagrees with their beliefs, and they mark you as a heretic if you don’t subscribe to their tenets. The only thing they’re missing is a deity.

I know it’s hard to believe, but you can be sex positive and still not be alright with pride parades where people march in bdsm gear. You can think drag shows are fine while still thinking they don’t need to be in our schools.

And, really, that’s what solidified my stance against the LGBT political lobby. They won’t leave our kids alone. I’m one of the most live-and-let-live people you will ever meet. When you start trying to indoctrinate my kids because you believe your ideology is the norm (or should be), that’s where my accommodation ends.

I accept you for who you are. I respect your existence just like I respect anyone else’s. But your ideas are not neutral, they are not without harm, and I’m the one who gets to guide the developing values of my kids. You’ve been in control of the direction of our society for too long. It’s time to draw some boundaries.

Why should a creator be responsible for the voiced opinions of their fans? That standard makes no sense no matter how you slice it. A creator’s job isn’t to police their audience, it’s to provide information/entertainment.

Just because he has the power to censor people you don’t like doesn’t mean he should, or that it’s a reasonable ask. Instead of passively alienating you by not acting, censoring those people would actively alienate them. He’s much better off letting individuals take responsibility for their own comments, rather than joining any given side’s thought-police.

As soon as you create the standard that you are responsible for what your fans say and do, you’ve lost. You can immediately be held accountable for the speech of the worst of them, and good luck regulating that.

We’re always finding ways to interact with the world and perceive it from a different dimension/angle. This comic isn’t so much inaccurate as it is exaggerated.

I’m pretty sure this is exactly how scientists felt the first time they developed microscopes, electron microscopes, and other technology that lets us experience the world in a different way. A mixture of “woah” and “mind-blown”.

I understand 90% of the science behind what I do as a medical diagnostic technologist. It’s still fucking magic as far as I’m concerned.

CTs and MRIs? Atom spin/relax releasing detectable energy waves that are somehow able to be read and aggregated by algorithms into a high detail image of the inside of a human body? Tell me that isn’t magic and I’ll call you a liar.

I’m not sure any province can. That’s one of the reasons rational people think the proposed numbers are insane. But immigrants will be bought and paid for voters, and they will supposedly help offset the tax-load needed to fund programs that provide for the aging boomer population.

Nevermind the houses/units we will need. Nevermind the aging parents those people may bring with them. Nevermind the wage stagnation, cultural conflicts, or lack of infrastructure.

Let’s keep this ponzi scheme going as long as possible. Screw sustainability.

I own property, and I’m 33. You can get there if you want it. I had to go back to school at 29 to start a new career, but it was worth it to put myself in a good financial position.

I think we need to stop being so focused on the past. I was born in Canada, and instead of complaining and trying to change the world to suit my needs, I accepted the way the world is now, and used it to my advantage as well as I could.

Do I have all the same cultural elements of my ancestors from 500 years ago? No. Do I still own the land my ancestors did 500 years ago? Nope. But I’ve got a career, a home, a car, and a smartphone. It’s more than a lot of people have.

Sometimes you have to accept that this is the world you were born into. You can either choose to complain and be miserable, or make it work for yourself.

We all use labor to meet our survival needs. Humans were just smart enough to specialize in different tasks, and we had to find a way to quantify our labor so we could trade it for different goods.

We don’t all need to be farmers, so a doctor will pay a farmer for food, and a farmer will pay a doctor for healthcare. It’s a much more efficient way to aggregate expertise in different areas, which means more services are available for your labor without you having to be capable of all of those different kinds of work.

A chimp may be able to feed themselves with their labor, but they aren’t making themselves smart phones or performing advanced healthcare. Indigenous societies in North America pre-British are a good example of what humans are capable of without a complex market system to trade skilled labor.

There are plenty of valid criticisms of capitalism. Especially the current state of capitalism in the west. It doesn’t mean I want to go full communist, far from it. But I’m a mixed economy man. I think certain things should be highly regulated or even owned by the government (and, by extension, the people).

Healthcare is one good example to me. I think private is fine to an extent, but I would never want a fully private system. I think the model in Canada is a good place to start, where public is the go-to option, but private exists if you want to skip the queue and can afford it. The dynamic between insurance and private healthcare in the states makes for a toxic experience for patients, and that serves as one of the primary reasons why I would never want to go fully private. Doctors shouldn’t have to fight tooth and nail to get your medication or diagnostic procedure approved when it’s medically necessary, assuming the system can reasonably absorb the cost.

Mixed economies are the way.

That sounds like too much personal accountability, I don’t think people will go for it. Actually, it sounds like something a conservative would say, and if there’s anything social media has taught me, it’s that personal accountability and conservatism are the stuff of bigots and bootlickers. /s

But really, I don’t think people will go for this. It’s easier to play the left/right game.

That’s not an entirely accurate perspective, but you’re not far off. The problem is that fixing this requires hard decisions, and it requires people in power to act against their own interests.

You want wealth inequality to get better? You need to increase the value of labor. You do that by eliminating free trade deals, bringing production back to the west, increasing prices on goods, and severely limiting immigration. Do that, and the value of labor will soar.

You should also severely limit the ability for the wealthy to own properties to rent. One of the main reasons the middle class existed was that the family home was simultaneously shelter, and an investment vehicle.

The whole structure of investment and shareholding has to be rethought as well. Its built of the concept of infinite growth, something that isn’t possible, and ends with businesses destroying themselves while trying to meet this impossible demand.

My problem with bubble zones is that they’re A) difficult to enforce, and B) protesting should be inconvenient. If we only allow protests in certain places, they’re extremely easy to ignore. This goes for any kind of protest on any issue.

In an ideal world, I don’t really want kids exposed to protests. But protests are only really effective when they take place where you don’t want them. If protests for trans rights only ever took place in a cordoned off area safely away from everyone, they wouldn’t be very effective either.

Parents should have a say what is being taught to their kids. LGBT values are an invasive culture change that is being pushed on kids without the interests of the parents in mind. This was equally true of the way Christianity was pushed on kids. I have always supported the secularization of schools. I don’t want the government teaching my kid what to believe. They should learn fact-based sciences and important life skills, values should be taught by the parents.

For the record, I’ve been an LGBT supporter all of my life. I’ve always preached acceptance of other people no matter their beliefs or circumstances. I’ve only recently had to start pushing back because I believe certain parts of the LGBT culture are not suitable for children. It does not make you evil or a bigot to seek compromise. We all have to live together in this nation, we need to find ways to make peace with each other.

Oh boy, this isn’t going to be a popular opinion. I’m a former therapist and I still work in healthcare. Part of why I left therapy is because I disagree with the prevalence of gender affirming care.

You’re allowed to disagree with me. I know it’s a contentious issue. But my experience is that our culture and institutions are using one label and one treatment as a panacea for a variety of issues where they are not appropriate. People with a variety of underlying mental health problems are being convinced into believing they have gender dysphoria, and they are funneled into that diagnosis and a type of treatment that is not as reversible as we pretend. Hormone therapy can be extremely detrimental to a developing body and mind, there are lots of studies out there to show this.

I think the core concepts behind the Trans acceptance movement are positive. I think people who can only find relief for their dysphoria through transitioning should be allowed to, and should be accepted and respected just as any other individual should be. As much as people hate Jordan Peterson, he has said these exact same things. I don’t see hatred in this stance. I see caution.

The anger you mistake for hatred is due to the concern of over-use of gender affirming care, not the existence of it. It absolutely should exist for those who don’t respond to other treatment methods. But I’ve seen a lot of patients come in assuming they are trans, desiring gender affirming care, when the reality is that you don’t have to be trans to hate yourself, hate your body, or feel an affinity for archetypes of the opposite gender. A lot of these people come in believing that transitioning will cure them of their disordered thoughts, but it is not a cure-all for all identity disorders or associated depression. Even if you do specifically have gender dysphoria, jumping to gender affirming care is radical. It’s not how we treat any other kind of disordered thinking, and largely stems from political interference into medicine rather than from science, in my opinion. There is no medical reason not to try more traditional forms of therapy and medications before pursuing the less understood and riskier treatments. We fast track this type of treatment now for ideological reasons regarding the sanctity of trans identity, not because it makes sense from the benefit/harm analysis used in every other aspect of medicine.

I very much wish the LGBT community could try to understand where moderates like myself are coming from. I have never treated a trans person with less respect than I would treat anyone else. I believe some people absolutely do not have any other viable options, and that transitioning can provide much needed relief for some. But I believe politics has overstepped into the realm of medicine in this case. At the very least, my hope is to protect children and teenagers from undergoing gender affirming care until it is absolutely clear and necessary that it is the only path of treatment. Not because trans people are evil, but because these treatments can do more harm than good if they aren’t absolutely necessary.