The degree of traffic that happens in online discourse hits an 11 during these events; some are engaged in good faith, some are actors and useful stooges, but most are LLMs (and sometimes legacy low effort bots that are much easier to spot, great for confirmation bias); the technology for drive-by commentary has never been “better” than now, and a dozen or so unique system prompts and not even a dozen RTX-4090s is more than enough to create a false consensus across the entirety of a platform.

Musk has 200,000 of even higher end ones (H100s). Get ready for this to be on all the time.

LLMs will yell into the void. It’s never been simpler.

Look, you keep debating step 3 while ignoring steps 1 and 2. My point remains it never even gets that far under historical context; pragmatically, there are many hurdles beyond just the legal framework.

I think we can at least agree that a major root cause of our electoral issues is FPTP, same with OP, so I’ll leave it at that.

E: Just wow. Wow. What a waste of time - textbook strawman sealion debate; nothing has nuance, everything is easy. Definitely not wasting more time on this.

It’s not really a party problem specifically - they’re more of a symptom. In reality, the FPTP winner-takes-all (with questionable SCOTUS and congression checks and balances), high risk, expensive break down then rebuild then break down then rebuild full pendulum swing incentivizes these mechanisms that result in no one winning, and a generation of setbacks every time you take a step forward.

In fairness, Trump is trying to “fix” this - you just may not agree that an authoritarian corporatocracy with him as Supreme Chancellor of the Galactic Republic is the right solution (and, frankly, most wouldn’t).

It’s kind of burying the lede to just remark PP is likened to “Trump light.” He has likened himself by exclusively pulling from Trump’s playbook, with the divisive rhetoric, outright untruths, dog-whistling, name calling, verb the noun slogans, and quite literally “Canada First” signs he still hangs in his speeches.

In Alberta he’s repeatedly espoused support for Danielle Smith’s insane policies, her personal hero and inspiration being the real “Trump light,” Ron DeSantis. Nevermind they have openly acknowledged (before the craziness) they’d rather work with Poiliviere, and he’s been heralded in the MAGA circles as Canada’s Trump moment (with a complete absence of the irony).

If he put on 200 lbs and lost all natural skin color, he’d be a slightly more articulate Trump impersonation.

Especially online - detection becomes possible over sustained interactions for only the most critical (at best), but you don’t get that online, and especially not on drive-by commenting, which is the norm for media/social media.

Phony consensus and bad rhetoric are one system prompt away, and the only thing I’d argue is there probably is no escaping it, even for the most civic minded and informed people. Your best bet in the coming months is an awareness it’s happening largely undetected, that we’ve all fallen for it, and explaining it to as many people as possible.

The big problem will be the vast majority thinks they can tell, that they’re uninfluenced, and that they have the inside line.

Two things can be true at the same time, and it can all run cover for each other.

You’ve probably nailed it, unfortunately. Which will beget more of this behaviour the next time he wants international theater and conflict of interest moneys to distract from national theater and conflict of interest moneys.

Definitely. But there’s learnings to be had here too.

Even if/when stability returns after that (on a 4/8 year basis), we know their governance is now openly bipolar, more than it has ever been; it doesn’t care what the facts are, it’s base doesn’t care what the realities are, just the pretense and if their populist icon is winning.

You can’t go back to trusting them as a center stage participant anymore, because in 4-8 years, you just get caught with your pants down again. Seeking out reliable, long term partners who are more resilient to full pendulum swings that gut everything is paramount, especially those that put international stability over momentary opportunistic grabs at public coffers.

Trump’s wiping out trillions of America’s power and credibility for coming decades for a couple billion in personal wealth consolidation. Worst case scenario for him; he’ll just fuck off somewhere else. Or maybe he becomes god king of earth through incremental annexation. Either way he doesn’t give a shit, and the next opportunist won’t either.

Sure, it’s absolutely valid that Trump has massively helped Liberals in the polls.

It’s also true that the Conservatives attempt to emulate Trump’s populist rhetoric also blew up in a post Trump victory, as they themselves drew the comparisons.

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Since he subcontracts all his thinking and none of his talking out of both sides of his mouth, I would assume someone somewhere must hire some at least half-competent analytics guy before it all becomes distorted through their cronyist chain of command.

I really wish we had done more - when we realized they were bipolar during the first presidency, we had ~8 years to do more.

At the onset they were still 70% trade partner, with a target end of this year to drop it to 50%.

We should diversify more, and even when we all collectively get 4-8 years of increased stability back from the Americans, we should never fully revert back; it’s not a problem they’re going to be able to fix, especially when they take the Department of Education and eliminate it as waste.

Except the can of pop is every can of pop that has ever existed.

Confirmed already; $1-5M lunch buy-ins with corporate execs per head - the topic? Tariff exemptions.

Who cares about billions and trillions of wealth destruction of the public coffers when he can make millions per day personally?

PC versus CP - at least one is demonstrably less malicious, but I’m inclined to agree this isn’t bullish for the future.

God speed. Hopefully if/when you can wrest control back your country can do something to bring sanity back to American politics, since it’s just bad for everyone.

Short of 2 decades and doubling the education budget, not sure what your options are though; going to be hard to undo all the international and reputational harm that’ll come out of it, even with the promise of 4-8 years of at least not outright malicious policy.

Good use of graffiti frankly, especially when contrasted with most of the other graffiti we’ve been seeing.

The main takeaway: The centralized role of coordinating a wide breadth of media organizations and incrementally corralling them towards one narrative, something essentially unique in the space no one else has, and with total lack of transparency, is the biggest distinction between them and everyone else.

Really talking about (American) Chatham Asset Management and PostMedia (a subsidiary), that own almost 80-90% of print media (written news and periodicals, including almost all rural papers and online content). Even now, most people I speak to barely know about either, and it’s reach is way beyond the listed periodicals.

Is this as big a deal as it sounds? Kind of. Because the CEO determined they were “insufficiently conservative”, he appointed Kevin Libin to coordinate all of the organizations under their umbrella to provide “reliably conservative media.” Consider what that phrase even means - it’s not perspective, it’s an introduction of bias. This isn’t something that really exists anywhere else in Canadian News ecosystem, even in the far right, and is one part of the media ecosystem’s challenges.

However, they also get the benefit of being “center” between lunatics like Rebel News and True North and the CBC; this gives both them and further right rags more legitimacy than earned by virtue of the total absence of a Canadian far left media ecosystem, hence the attacks on the CBC itself (which does contain editorial, but is general one of the most fact based and investigative journalism driven media organizations in Canada). It also allows them to “create a consensus” by essentially just agreeing with themselves.

Even the Toronto Star, one of the “most left” credible independent media organizations, is now under (separate) conservative ownership.

Frankly, if you’re a subsidiary, you should be forced to wear every one of your ownership’s emblem “Chatham/PostMedia presents” in double font every time you throw up your Vancouver Sun or Calgary Herald.

You don’t have to like or dislike any of these organizations, but the total lack of transparency while structuring this discussion as central consensus is about as disingenuous as you can get.

Things like Ground News (factuality and partisan bias news screeners) help somewhat, but require some literacy in terms of statistics and data. It’s worth learning tools like these (or tracking it yourself across everything you read, and looking at a wide berth of the various perspectives in Canada, which is extremely laborious especially in an age where we can barely get people to click past headlines, hence the specific name drop for Ground News which does a lot of this for people).