Alberta adopted this model and saw an increase in public health wait times and a sharp increase in the required government spending required to run the public system.

Creating a two tiered system means that it bleeds doctors, nurses and admin into the private sector which is fundamentally at odds with the philosophy that everyone deserves the right to life sustaining care. If the rich want to dodge the cue then they can quite frankly afford the plane ticket. If the system is being undermined by politicians - oust the politicians. Let them know that that system is of the highest priority and should be first to see reinvestment.

But we should all be aware that Canada is one of the most challenging landscapes for delivery of any kind of health care. We are diffuse over a large landmass and the commitment to the system means that if you live in a remote place 2 hours away from the nearest surgery then the government is on the hook to spend an outsized amount of budget to uphold the commitment of care for you. The temptation to cut corners is always there and each Provincial trust is its own battleground. That we have the level of service we do is a credit to the efficacy of public health systems… Which means upping the costs to create competitive private sector development hurts us all.

It may be a step up for Americans to have any system at all as a right to health safety net but it’s a sharp step down for anywhere running a full public system.

That is actually one of the major issues at play. One of the kind of predatory things about right wing politics is it plays into a fallacy that the truth is simple, easily recognizable and can be rendered down into axioms a child can understand. Anything that doesn’t fall under these parameters cannot be the truth.

But science moved away from big axiomatic stuff like 50 years ago. It became the study of variation and nuance.

The left attempts to have a aspects of this simple explanation stuff in sections by adopting almost slogan-like things - take “Trans women are women” as an example. That easily digestible slogan sits on top of a whole bunch of consequentialist based philosophy, psychological research with a focus on harm reduction, a history of uphill public advocacy to just put trans issues on the radar and being trans itself isn’t easy to explain. It is simple and quippy - but not axiomatic. So a lot of people on the right tear into it as a target because the optics of defending a short quippy but nuance laden argument in slogan form while keeping it short and easily digestible is basically impossible.

This issue is throughout progressive political thought. Any short form word we use to describe practically anything has a whole swack of addendums, hidden complications, edge cases and multiple historical definitions. If you use very technical language you can be more specific but then you can easily talk over the heads of your audience.

Well… Short answer talking about “the left” and “the right” is effectively doing something called “constructing a public”. These are are not just political constructs, they are political constructs that do certain things. Neither of these constructs have hard boundaries and throughout time they shift.

But there is a distinct difference. When you look at the right, while the presentation changes they have a fairly straightforward citable group of guiding philosophy traceable through a small handful of writing. If you read Thomas Malthus and Edmond Burke they will sound like slightly more archaic versions of modern pundits on the right. When you listen to the modern pundits you will notice that they are very repetitive and what differentiates one from another is more or less just presentation style. That repetition of talking points changes it’s arguements but never it’s foundation. Since it’s mostly in service of protecting a status quo where hereditary privilege is upheld it doesn’t have to get complicated. It just has to justify the world as it has been and that humans are sneaky, fundamentally flawed and morally defunct but that by structuring society as a winnowing process where playing the game the rightful and just few will rise to the top.

But when you look at “the left” it’s not an easy gradient, it’s a loose scattering of little clusters of very different ideologies and guiding philosophies. Since it largely works of a guiding concept of dissolution of established aggregated personal fortunes and radical anti-supremacist framework of various forms it’s not uniform. There’s anti-colonialism, anti-racism, anti-monopolist, anti-capitalist, anti-discriminatory, pro-neurodiversity, expanded personal rights, pro public service, pro democratic and anti democratic groups, pro freedom of movement, anarchists, and acedemic political theorists each with individual theories about how to bring about a state of all these things when none of this has in living memory existed. It’s not generally trying to defend a status quo but trying to feild test different ways of doing things… So basically everybody and their dog has a slightly different opinion of what is a good idea.

It’s kind of hard to see " bad faith actors" as it were because any two leftists might have almost no ideological overlap as far as praxis. They might not see each other as being part of the same tribe even if outsiders looking in would classify them as “left” and they might all claim to be “left” themselves… It’s not that it’s contradictory, it’s that the branching paths of divergent evolving philosophies have rambled off in a whole bunch of different directions and effectively become whole other creatures entirely.

Love the idea… But let’s be real, Conservative rhetoric has depended on attacking peoples trust in acedemia, administrative government positions and anyone who is an expert who doesn’t reinforce the vibe of being a “dissenting voice”. Fact checks make those of us who understand sourcing feel like we’re owning the idiots, but for the Conservative audience iit very rarely shifts people out of their steadfast adherence and instead tends to make them distrust the medium the debate is held in.

Conservative rhetoric has been a poisoned well for a long time. To play by their game one has to look more at a vibes based playbook. Their voting block generally have a misplaced overconfidence in their own ability to read body language and tone. It’s literally not the words and definitely not the facts, it’s the affect they are delivered in.

It’s part of why they dunno how to think about Harris and have conspiracy theories about her earrings piping her answers. She is outperforming Trump on affect of delivery based on their playbook and they don’t know how to interpret that.

Oh but there is an implied value - superiority. When you give a group of people a descriptive property with no inverse you are basically creating a construct of “assumed default”. This comes with other issues of those falling outside the default having no way to effectively talk about people of the assumed default group without using words that have value judgements baked in. Like if I am calling you “a normal person” the implicit value judgement is that I am an abnormal person. I am “othered”.

This sort of denial of language assumes that a group that you are given tools to talk about never and should never talk about your group back utilizing those same tools.

Arguably for a lot of stuff that folk encounter that some count as “subliminal” just means they don’t understand the language and employ of framing devices, juxtaposition, abstraction or rhetoric. We need to start teaching that shit as basic literacy in schools because once you understand them it’s not “subliminal” anymore as it becomes readable text.

The simple presence of an ad in your peripheral vision definitely counts as properly subliminal though and it’s still a menace.

“Being Hot” is never someone’s entire personality. Most of the time it’s just the veneer used to keep people at a distance. There are advantages to not being hot - mainly you are not hassled by people for attention. Getting approached by people who want something from you all the time tends to make one put up walls. It’s easier to be kind when so little is generally expected of you because it’s not being demanded regularly.

Not everyone has the strength to be as nice and polite to the 50th person trying to score their number that week as they are to the first. We as a society spend way too much time dehumanizing people because of this shit. I am not conventionally attractive and I bless my lucky stars that I grew up never being denied affection by family or friends because I wasn’t good looking. I see people at my job talk about the pretty actor folk behind their backs and it sounds just as catty and insecure as the shit people said about me for being unattractive.

I fucking hate thos saying. The moralizing of vanity is just another way to feel superior. The people who put a lot of work into how they look do so for a multitude of reasons. Sometimes it’s because they are just having fun but other times it’s because they grow up being told that they are never enough. That they are simply being deficient for not trying hard enough in which case their lack of vanity becomes instead the moral failure of gluttony or sloth. There is no win state. So then you are simply reinforcing that who they are aside from their appearance is worthless because they are empty voids for caring about the one thing that might be a rare source of validation. We all experience the effects of the privilege of attractiveness or it’s lack. A lot of us spend lifetimes unpacking the toxic effects of that programming. This isn’t the way to go about stopping that cycle.

“Vanity makes a person ugly inside” is just another way to put someone down so the person wielding this cliche can feel big. It’s moralizing someone’s relationship to their physicality and preying on places where people are trained to be weak.

Yay for the social sanctity minding one’s own beeswax!

Absolutely LUDICROUS, they always try and walk it in.

The sort of “Band of Brothers” vibe is something I have noticed talking with the two folks from high school that fell that direction that I know. It feels like a high school clique but with parasocial relationships. Like they don’t want the hassle of being king but they do want to be knights lording it over some peasants.

It’s a very common thing for people to equate queerness with other concepts of otherness like “not from my group!” type pearl clutching. Bigots in a lot of places are weirdly more accepting of individual queer folks when they are noticeably foreign and more treat the concept of people being queer as an outside corrupting influence… Nevermind that the existence of queerness is basically a universal. People from non-permissive places really don’t want to believe that their culture will also constantly manifest new queer people. They often believe something along the lines of if they stamp on it hard enough it becomes more rare instead of just more people hiding and struggling in isolation and silence often risking their lives if they misjudge a social situation or dying because of a pervasive sense of dispair.

But no matter how hard you stomp the “problem” never goes away. You have to keep stomping forever in perpetuity. The boot must always rest heavy on someone’s neck and will never touch floor again because there will always be someone there to rise if the pressure ever stops. It’s in part why the concept of people essentially just being “born that way” has been so powerful.

I realize it’s a joke but actually one of issues with aggressive minimalism is that it’s actually very nessisary to be decently wealthy to pull off. If you can not afford to treat tools and materials as effectively single use items that are frequently expunged from your spaces then it can actually be fairly wasteful and expensive. Extensive lending resources like tool libraries in cities being available makes it more tenable but otherwise yeah… Minimalism is kind of for the rich.

Not… Always… The “you can always come back” thing is not something that you can always count on. Being wholly rejected for trying to be your authentic self can leave some wicked deep scars. It’s always on the wronged person to forgive when there’s a lot of pressure to accept someone back into the fold. It can destroy you when everyone around you just wants to forget what happened in favor of social peace when you have to carry that damage with you. Coming out as trans historically is a lot of people’s last ditch effort to live in that they feel they the status quo is killing them. Sometimes they also look at being openly trans as the last resort failure state but are desperate to find any reason to go on even if the tradeoffs are horrible.

The kicks you receieve when you are at your lowest point you never really forget. Sometimes “trying to make it right with the wronged” means accepting you hurt someone bad enough that you don’t get second chances to try again and having to respect that.