wampus

Such a wimpy style of governance from the look of all these proceedings. Even if there are legitimate complaints, the person 'getting grilled' could practically sit there singing the alphabet, and the outcome would be the same.

It's like those odd sport interviews where the person just responds "I'm just here to not get fined" to every question -- ie. I'm forced to be here for pageantry/contract reasons, but there's no real point to any of it. Both the questions, and the answers, are ultimately pretty meaningless.

I laughed when I first saw those two UK-ancestry Indian girls who's mother had them 'identify' as First Nations in order to get tons of free grants / govt support, which they used to setup businesses and such... and the news was like "Why would someone do this?!?". For the money and govt perks, obviously.

One thing I didn't see much of in the article, were options to resolve the issue aside from a brief note about there not being many options currently. So what options do we realistically have to address the issue?

Do FN not keep a registry of their people, and/or do they not have established processes for third party's to verify identity claims via a simple form? Like do businesses have an option, sorta like running a background check with law enforcement, to check an identity?

I'd personally vote to remove the incentive for the frauds. Race-based benefits that are so lopsided you have people committing fraud to get those perks, a situation that seems antithetical to what the Charter and democratic nations are built on: that all races are equal. Remove individual govt incentives based on race -- no bursaries, grants, funding, tax breaks, etc. Have the fed gov supports be based exclusively on nation-to-nation type supports, sorta like they do with the provinces in terms of fund transfers, and base those transfers on the division of responsibility between FN and Canada, tied to the treaties where possible. Instead of having oblique benefits paid out to individuals spread across the entire country via tax breaks etc, have the funds be directly applied to 'nations' to fix things like drinking water availability. If an FN has no one living in their area, or if they free-ride off of colonial infrastructure that's been built, they get less 'national' funding -- sorta like if a foreign country came in and built a port for Canada to use, and we had free use of it, it'd be nuts for the govt to then up our taxes to pay for a new port... cause it's already there and available.

The US officially giving tech execs military ranks is.... interesting. One of the stronger reasons to avoid companies like Huawei, was that the CCP had direct military ties / agents working within Huawei. The argument in favour of US tech companies in comparison, was that while they may have agreements with the US military, they were at arms length. Now they aren't, and the rationale seems to be attempting to shift to "just trust us", while they openly start major wars/conflicts and support genocidal actions in the middle east.

idk. If I were involved in the decision making for any critical area, I'd avoid the hell out of foreign controlled anything in my regular stacks at this point. Even if it means you have some efficiency hits until there may be an in-country provider available. It wouldn't matter who the other country is at this point, as the US going awol is something most wouldn't have 'bet' on like a decade ago, but here we are.

A news story about CNN having a 'super cut' of Trumps 2 week pledges, posted to MSN, where the article only links over to the DailyBeast....

wtf? If there's a super cut somewhere on CNN, why wouldn't that be the link posted?? Why are we posting up links to news stories about other news stories linking to other news stories, with the main content obfuscated behind a journalistic circle jerk?

Meh. I gotta admit, I'm pretty numb / antagonistic to this sort of thing at this point. In my view, race-based politics / privileges are antithetical to the idea of democracy and equality. I don't support any race-based group attempting to gain privilege in a democratic country, and I can't see any reason why a race-based group should be treated with respect, as their aims are inherently racist.

One of the things we're witnessing in the USA currently, is a backlash to this sort of minority interest superseding majority well being. Sorta like how Jody Wilson-Raybould's bail reforms put Indigenous demographic representation in prison ahead of general public good/well-fare, and triggered the revolving door offender issues we've been trying to sort out for the past 6 years. For some stupid reason we don't call that racism, even though she took action in a position of power to explicitly benefit her own race. Framed slightly differently, what she did is like "destroying your enemy from within", an overtly hostile action taken against the interests of the majority of Canadians. It's about on par with how Harjit Sajjan used Canadian spec ops to prioritize non-Canadian Sikh rescues during the pull out of Kabul, an act our spy agencies flagged, but our liberal government turned around and said we couldn't call that racism, because we wouldn't consider the action racist if Sajjan wasn't also a Sikh. Our government's trying to tell us that using government influence to benefit your own race isn't racist: it's utter absurdity. The public isn't as stupid and gullible as some think, its just that so far the alternatives at the polling station have proven even less appealing.

On Lemmy I'm likely a minority voice, but I reckon there are a significant number of Canadians who feel the same. The more unreasonable 'demands' from such groups, the more likely that chatter about a minority-privilege industry will increase -- the more likely for a catastrophic blow back against any and all equity efforts that have been brought in to date. BC's already got a few politicians shifting into a new party with very negative views of current norms towards Indigenous rights -- and seeing indigenous people get more and more race-based privileges and exceptional treatment in government, isn't going to quell that resentment at all. Putting a group of racists, who feel empowered/entitled to speak as racists and only focus on their race-based interests, up as leaders in Canada, a democratic country, just seems wrong and embarrassing. Like how the hell do introductions get made with a straight face in these circumstances.... "Hi, we're Canada, a democratic nation that tries our best to conform to the principle that all people are created equal and are equally deserving of dignity and respect. And here's the group of racists, who have power based on their race/blood, you need to meet with and appease if you want to get things done, apparently?". If Canada can't come to an international gathering as a united voice, one able to enact/make good on decisions made by the group of international leaders, then we likely shouldn't be part of that group -- though maybe that's the "destroy them from within" approach that FN are targeting here.

At most, in terms of international politics, treat their leaders like premiers. Hell, some of our premiers are FN, and from what we've seen Wab Kinew's one of the most sane premiers on deck currently -- if FN want to speak for Canada at the federal level, they can run for election on a platform that benefits / considers everyone involved and get a majority mandate, rather than just their race-specific (racist) interests.

Like I disagree strongly with the recent bills Carney's put forward, as they seem like over-reach -- but if the alternative is for my interests to be subservient to a non-elected racially-fenced minority group.... at least I can theoretically vote to ditch Carney and crowd next time (hopefully there'll be viable alternatives! Maybe a FN party with a broader view!).

Carney was never a good choice, he was just a less bad choice then Pierre. Pierre would've gladly started chopping up the country for Trump, and/or brought Musk north for a Doge north department, or something even worse. Jagmeet wasn't realistic, and didn't offer a great platform, in part because they conceded to the libs before it even got rollin just to try and stop the cons.

Carney is a staunch neo-liberal, with a banker background to boot. Him being pro-market and pro-international business (ie. non canadian business) isn't 'new' for him. Him throwing small businesses under the bus is totally on brand. But every party toted the same general neo-liberal approach, without any pushes for drastic overhauls of existing norms that would've been needed if we were to actually respond to what's going on. We needed a more drastic shift away from the market-based rules, because the US had thrown out the rule book / started overtly breaking them on a routine basis -- Carney, and all the rest, are still sticking to those old rules hoping things will blow over. Opening markets and acting like its business as usual granting access / control to US interests because "business!", while the US president openly says they'll be selling deficient military hardware to their allies cause "maybe they wont be allies for long". Hell, the US bailed after like half a day at the G7, and spent most of that time whining about why Russia wasn't included... if you think the status quo is still in the room...

And its unlikely that govt will listen to feedback between elections. Especially if you're unfortunate enough to be from a riding that ALWAYS votes one way or another, as many of us are, because why would politicians even bother listening to your feedback if the vote is pre-determined in your area already? Alberta can be given pipelines left right and center, they'll still vote conservative. Parts of Vancouver can be completely ignored for decades because they always vote NDP.

Well, I mean, the reason they point out Israel's behaviour is because it's got similarities to what Russia's doing in Ukraine. Arguably, its even worse, given that they're essentially genociding people in Gaza who can't even fight back at all.

But if you're gonna shrug while Israel bombs Iran, because they felt like Iran was a threat so they wanted to pre-emptively strike them / their nuke program... then you have less moral footing to condemn Russia's actions in Ukraine.

And while most sane people think Israel should just... stop killing babies and stuff... the reality is that almost all western governments are continuing to trade / support Israel, even if they attempt to put on angry faces for PR reasons when talkin about it. Clearly Western Democratic nations have no issue trading with / partnering with Genocidal regimes who attack their neighbours, commit obvious Genocides, and threaten nuclear conflicts etc.

I think it became inevitable that traditional 'sites' were going to be in trouble once AI bots gained ground. The user interface is much more organic / user friendly, given that it can be conversational.

It's why big corps were so quick to start building walls/moats around the technology. If end users had control over what sites their AI bots used to pull information from, that'd be a win for the consumer/end-user, and potentially legitimate news sites depending on how the payment structure is sorted out. Eg. Get a personalized bot that references news articles from a curated list of trusted / decent journalist sites across a broad political spectrum, and you'd likely have a really great "AI assistant" to keep you up to date on various current events. This sort of thing would also represent an existential threat to things like Googles core marketing business, as end users could replace many of their 'searches' with a curated personalized AI assistant trained on just reputable sources.

Big tech wants to control that, so that they can advertise via those bots / prioritize their own agenda / paid content. So they want to control the AI sources, and restrict end users' ability to filter garbage. If users end up primarily interacting with an AI avatar, and you can control the products / information that avatar presents, you have a huge amount of control over the individuals and their spending habits. Not much of a surprise.

It'd be cool to see a user friendly local LLM that allowed users to point it at reference sites of their choosing. Pair that with a news-site data standard that streamlines the ability to pull pertinent data, and let news agencies charge a small fee for access to those APIs to fund it a bit. Shifting towards LLM based data delivery, they could even potentially save a bit in terms of print / online publications -- don't need a fancy expensive user-facing web app, if they're all just talking to their LLM-based model-hot AI assistant anyway.

Israel's actions in the past couple years have all seemed like sorta a desperate attempt to leverage the US Hegemony that's protected them, before the US buckles.

Sorta like imagine a kid in Grade 1 who's a total racist bully to his classmates. But the kid has an older brother in grade 6 who has no issue beating the shit outta any Grade 1 kid who fights back. When the older brother nears the transition to middle school -- at which point the younger will lose his protection -- the younger brother starts instigating like crazy, to try and establish dominance while still protected.

Canada ought to invest heavily in vaccine tech / bio firms. Even more so with the states not doing so.

Most obvious reason being basic health concerns, and the response required for things like pandemics, which are likely to increase in frequency as the world burns to the ground. The less obvious reason is that those assets / skills double as bio weapon developers (as we're seeing practically everywhere, things like the Geneva convention / anti-genocide stuff has become very flexible). All the talk about getting nukes is silly, when you can quietly have a team of 2 dudes in an off-grid forest hut, with a chicken coup and a couple drones, potentially do billions of dollars of damage to a country that is... in a rush to further expose themselves as vulnerable to this sort of threat, by firing all their researchers/scientists on the subject.

So we can invest in biotech for generally altruistic and proper reasons, while having a very easy to conceal / clandestine alterior motive that can serve as a bit more of a deterrent / safety net. Win-win.

Sorta like how we ought to roll our climate disaster response teams under a military umbrella, and jack up our spending on things like logistics teams for moving things in and out of disaster areas. We need to hit 2% or 5% GDP spending on Military for Nato? Don't see why we can't meet that target with ease, just by spending more on our own natural disaster response capabilities at the federal level. Can even lend those assets out to assist our allies when they get hit with issues. Again, win-win.

You can get banned here for similar reasons as you'd get banned from things on Reddit. In theory the federated setup helps to mitigate it somewhat, in that if you get banned from your primary instance you can hop over to one that's a bit more agreeable to your perspective and continue on.

For example, I was recently banned from LGBTQ+ on, I think the world server, cause I posted a fairly benign straight opinion to a post that had an image basically asking for cis commentary. It had like 5-7 upvotes, about 13-15 down votes at the time the mods kicked me out -- so even amongst the community it was a bit wishy washy, but the mods still opted to take action. On Reddit, that might've gotten me flagged / banned site-wide, depending on which White House narrative the company is marching to on that day. Here I just lose access to the LGBTQ+ community, shrug at them echo chambering up, and continue about my day.

In terms of "Why do we only control the speech of leftists", I imagine it's because the threads you continue to access are left leaning -- meaning those left in your bubbles, are the left-leaning sorts saying they'd been banned. Right leaning comments, and even (in my view) some centrist / neutral comments, still get people banned. These days we all basically have to assume that there are companies / algorithms creating bubbles in online spaces; you need to temper it with a good bit of secondary sources outside of 'social media' to get a more accurate picture of people's mindsets/trends. Eg. Social Media + direct views of national/local news paper sites + in person discussion with various sorts.

I agree that this is a significant issue / problem for democratic countries, and that the trend of violence towards journalists in America is an obvious concern.

That said, the media has generally turned a blind eye as Israel killed a record number of journalists the past few years - and not only that, but they continued to broadcast out that regimes narrative. Given that the media / journalists "at large" have ignored this sort of issue in another "democratic" country that's gone authoritarian, I find it totally unsurprising that another authoritarian-trending regime feels emboldened / empowered to treat journalists the same.