That’s why I said highly improbable. But if they became states it would be the end of Canadian politics. It would be all American politics at that point. edit: typo

Currently it seems like there is a highly improbable but mathematically possible outcome where the Conservatives and Bloc Québécois form a government. Canada gets to be the 51st state and Quebec gets to be the 52nd state. 💀

Let’s get that last seat! edit: typos

How long ago was that? If you did that to someone younger now, who hasn’t heard of it, they would probably believe you without asking if it was real. The fact Iran-Contra is real is neither here nor there. What’s changed is how people engage with conspiracy theories. We should want people to think critically and ask for evidence.

People already dismissed conspiracy theories in general. I’m old enough to remember a time when conspiracism was a fringe belief system back in the 90’s and 2000’s when I was a kid.

The right-wing infosphere has normalized conspiracism. Fox News got people to believe there was a conspiracy where there was none so the Republicans could enact the equivalent of a conspiracy in broad daylight. TDS, Trump derangement syndrome, is the go to accusation for the MAGA movement against their opposition. Calling people conspiracy theorists would probably cause a bit of cognitive dissonance for Republican voters.

Some conspiracies do exist, and those who are part of them ALWAYS deny them.

All kinds of people deny conspiracy theories usually because of the lack of evidence and attempts at grifting. Trump never denies involvement in Jan 6th, he mostly lies about the nature of the attack on the capital. He intentionally mischaracterizes the attack as peaceful despite the deaths.

Has Putin lost any support for all the defenestration and underwear poisoning? People used to think dictators would lose support if dictators killed people in the street. The truth is if you control the narrative you can get away with killing people and if you don’t you can’t get away with doing nothing wrong.

I’m going to fast forward through the fact that the entirety of the above comment was full of nothing but baseless conspiracy theories pretending that they aren’t conspiracy theories and that some other conspiracy theories are the actual conspiracy theories. Own it.

I’m fast forwarding because the comment has completely missed my argument’s actual point.

So I live in a world where the rich and the powerful can commit whatever crimes they want and be elected world leaders.

My argument’s position is not that governments couldn’t do this in theory. My argument’s position is that they have no reason to do this in practice. They don’t need to make our deaths look like suicides to kill us. They can kill us.

They can kill us and lose no support whatsoever in a fair and free election. And it’s way easier than covering it up, because they can use the investigations as a talking point in their rallies without the downside of consequences because there are no consequences. The people still think it’s true because they are trapped in information silos. And they all accuse everyone else of having TDS, Trump derangement syndrome. edit: typos

this is the language of the powerful this is how they communicate to us not to resist and blow the whistle.

So I live in a world where the rich and the powerful can commit whatever crimes they want and be elected world leaders.

They could have this person killed and claim credit for it and still get elected. Trump publicly ordered a mob to descend on the capital and they killed cops. Now he’s president again.

Critical thinking is a skill. Anyone can learn it. We can measure a person’s ability by giving them tests and throwing a wide array of problems at them.

Trump isn’t just being facetious when he says could get away with shooting someone in public and not lose a single supporter. He is largely correct. The bulk of his supporters are people in the MAGA cult who blindly believe in any conspiracy theory they see on facebook. They would either not believe he did it or if he did that it was justified.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/donald-trump-fifth-avenue-comment/

So let’s continue to engage in some critical thinking.

What are the rich and powerful communicating by jumping through these extra hoops? That they can have us killed but only if they make it look like a suicide?

how many more of them are you going to watch die before you rise from your chair?

If it turns out that this person or a revelation that all the people who conspiracy theorists assert were murdered were to come to light tomorrow do you think anything would change? We know who Trump is. We know who many of these powerful people are. We keep electing them. There has been no up rising despite knowing about their connection to Epstein and other criminal activities.

You are serving their agenda by sowing doubt.

I’m arguing in favor of the current official narrative so if anything I’m sowing trust, but I digress. What are they gaining they don’t already have by me arguing this? If a government did this they won’t be able to keep it a secret for long, see the recent Signal chats, and they won’t face the blow back they deserve, see the last decade of history.

What’s happened here is that reality is outpacing the conspiracy’s capacity to be disconcerting and distressing. Conspiracy takes after narrative. This idea that powerful elites need to hide their crimes to maintain power is almost comforting. There’s a way for good to defeat evil that elites have to respect or face consequences. Unlike in narrative where the revealing of a truth is met by public outcry and backlash, in reality the truth is met with a doubling down on candidates and deeply held beliefs no matter how awful they are.

So I live in a world where the rich and the powerful can commit whatever crimes they want and be elected world leaders.

Conspiracy theorists live in a world where the rich and powerful can commit whatever crimes they want and be elected world leaders and then vengefully kill their accusers, but make it look like a suicide for some reason.

Seems like the same thing with extra steps. Why do people think they would want or need to do the extra steps?

Netanyahu’s goals are to deny Palestinian statehood and form a greater Israel. He does not care about the hostages.

Iran also sold drones to Russia and have been a longer ally than Israel. But I guess that doesn’t really matter to dictatorships. Russia doesn’t really need Iran anymore now that they have Israel and the US.

Yeah, but I would think the Iranian leadership would rather have the US at their beck and call than as an enemy trying to wipe them off the face of the Earth no?

edit: It probably wasn’t up to Iran. Russia could be backstabbing them for the shiny new toy that is a fascist Israel.

“The Trump administration and the White House were consulted by the Israelis on their attacks on Gaza tonight and as President Trump has made clear to Hamas, the Houthis, Iran - all those who seek to terrorise not just Israel but the United States of America will see a price to pay,” Leavitt said.

“All hell will break loose and all of the terrorists in the Middle East - the Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas, Iranian-backed terror proxies and Iran themselves - should take President Trump very seriously when he says he is not afraid to stand for law-abiding people.”

I figured Trump would want to make peace with Iran since they’re also a Russian ally. At some point I guess you have to choose and we’re already too in deep with Israel to be neutral. So Trump will be supporting the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians and war to form a greater Israel against Iran and its proxies. That’s awful, for a bit there I thought we might have accidentally allied with everyone in the Middle East. edit: added quotes

Genocide denial is still genocide denial even if your argument uses victims of one genocide to deny that genocide happened to other groups of people.

Try telling that to the face of someone whose whole family died in the death marches.

My argument is genocide is bad, ethnic cleansing is bad, and that there is no meaningful difference between the two.

Your argument is genocide is bad, ethnic cleansing is frowned but somehow less bad, and that there is a meaning distinction between ethnic cleansing and genocide that your argument does not articulate.

Luis Moreno Ocampo, the inaugural prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, has classified the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians as a second Armenian genocide, and opined that the inaction of the international community encouraged Azerbaijan to act with impunity.[34][35]

The number of deaths has nothing to do with it. The intent is the same, the only difference between the two genocides is that they were less successful at killing people in the second one. The only people that are helped by defending a distinction between ethnic cleansing and genocide, that does not exist, are the people who want to commit genocide.

I think the vast majority of Democrats in House and Senate will bend the knee or just stay silent before facing persecution.

Since Trump’s inauguration, the Democrats have been ineffective so far, but they haven’t been silent. We’ll find out soon.

And everybody voting the furthest left viable is a flimsy strategy for fighting fascism.

It was the only useful, viable strategy we had.

Many people already do that all the time, but you can’t make sure that everybody does.

We can count on people to act in their own self-interest. People can organize online to spread true information. The issue was that people fell for propaganda that convinced them to act against their own interests without them realizing it.

Also, with this there never was a chance to move the party any further left. Every election there was this myth that you have to vote moderate to change the party, but it never happened. Why should it? Moderates can say that the voters have shown they want moderate positions when they win. And when they lose for some reason they go, “Well, if you need them the most the progressives will stab you in the back. Let’s cut them out”. This is what I mean there are no consequences for Democrats, at least for the leadership that’s moderate and neoliberal. They will never move.

My argument is that voting for neoliberal Democrats will only incrementally shift the party to the left. In order to make the Democrats meaningfully change from a leaning right of center organization to at least a leaning left of center organization they must be co-opted by a progressive or socialist candidate with a populist narrative. This populist narrative would ideally be a progressive and socialist agenda. Like Bernie tried to do twice. In order for someone like Bernie to do this we needed more time before a fascist takeover.

We know this strategy can work because Trump did it to the Republican party. He used a populist narrative of white christian nationalism. However, we are now out of time and relying on the idea that fascist incompetence will give us another chance.

There is no fulcrum on the political spectrum that can force Democrats to change. And if what your argument wants is a reason for Democrats to change that is not consequences but incentives. To be clear, in a democracy the only consequence for losing elections is to lose out on political power. There is no mechanism besides voting to make Democrats agree with one group of constituents. Democrats look at who voted and then chase those votes.

As long as money is in politics the incentives will always be for the Democrats to incrementally change at best. At a pace that is far to slow to fix wealth inequality or climate change. Political power has to be seized when it is up for grabs during primaries in order to see more systemic change. But in order to do that there needed to be future elections which is no longer guaranteed.

Your argument’s defense of a nonexistent boundary between genocide and ethnic cleansing boils down to genocide denial. There is no agreed upon definition of ethnic cleansing. There is no way to peacefully forcefully relocate a group of people. An attempt to forcefully relocate a group of people is motivated by the desire to destroy that group in whole or in part.

The quote from the wiki article points out everything I have now written down in this comment. It’s written as a series of rhetorical questions with clear answers. Your argument’s effort to misrepresent the wiki page’s descriptive analysis of ethnic cleansing as an official definition is an attempt to police a none existent boundary. You argument left out the last part of that section.

Multiple genocide scholars have criticized distinguishing between ethnic cleansing and genocide, with Martin Shaw arguing that forced deportation necessarily results in the destruction of a group and this must be foreseen by the perpetrators.

A call for ethnic cleansing is a call for genocide. There is no way to engage in peaceful forceful deportation or population transfer. There is no meaningful difference between getting rid of a group by forcefully removing them and destroying them.

The Armenian genocide involved death marches, into the desert without food or water. What’s the meaningful difference between sending people to die in the desert and destroying them? There isn’t one.

https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-i/armenian-genocide

Oh, lol. XD
🫶🇨🇦

I found this quote useful so I’m going to put it here as well as it seems incredibly relevant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing

“How could ‘forced deportation’ ever be achieved without extreme coercion, indeed violence? How, indeed, could deportation not be forced? How could people not resist? How could it not involve the destruction of a community, of the way of life that a group has enjoyed over a period of time? How could those who deported a group not intend this destruction? In what significant way is the forcible removal of a population from their homeland different from the destruction’ of a group? If the boundary between ‘cleansing’ and genocide is unreal, why police it?”

You’ve got to put a /s on that. People in this comment section unironically believe that.