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Head of the BC Conservatives John Rustad survived a leadership review but participation is low and his party is a mess.  BC politics may settle in to the NDP as the sober party of university-educated managers and the BC Conservatives as the party of the people who watch too many online videos and listen to too many podcasts like the US Republicans. That would leave capital in a bind, because they liked having a party that would union-bash but otherwise governed in ways The Economist would approve of. https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2025/09/24/Rustad-Survives-BC-Conservatives-Implode/

The BC Greens now have a 25-year-old leader whose only electoral experience is student politics. She pushes one regressive policy (free tuition for domestic students, people from rich families consume more education in Canada, and there are already large subsidies to low-income students, so that is like "free docking for yacht owners" or "no taxes on your first rental property"). https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2025/09/29/How-Zoomer-Became-Leader-BC-Green-Party/

"Please continue with the horrific book"

"Pretty much a fae trap"

"Well I've unlocked a new irrational fear when going to the loo in the middle of the night... "

"Do I need to get out the etymological dictionaries? "

Two stories from the world of finance: a Ponzi scheme in Alberta which collapsed in 2023 after the rise in interest rates, and someone with an ambitious plan to take replace The Hudson Bay Company with a new chain of department stores but possibly not the capital or expertise.

It probably says something about my circles that most Canadians I know are quite sour about Carney's government already, but it's actually if anything slightly increased its advantage over the Conservatives since the election. Are the Conservatives just in a horrible mess federally or something?

I don't think anyone really likes Mark Carney.  He is a centrist neoliberal with a PhD in economics and a background in central banking.  But Pierre Polievre is a MAGA nutcase and the NDP have no leader at all (and said a lot of economically illiterate things during the last election: centrist economists have a lot of problems, but they are going to spend the next 50 years pointing to the second Trump administration to illustrate their lessons on the importance of free trade, an independent central bank, comparative advantage, etc etc etc.).  And Canada has no good options today and Carney is competent and can form and follow a strategy even if its a centrist neoliberal strategy.  We could do worse!

Trying to break a strike after 12 hours because people who can afford to take vacations by air are facing unexpected expenses is very neoliberal, but its not the worst thing a PM of Canada could do.

For my entire lifetime, Canadian elites were rewarded for integrating more closely with the USA and centralizing power within Canada eg. the dictatorship of the Prime Minister's Office and all the cozy little monopolies and oligopolies in different industries.  That path now leads to becoming something like the elite of Puerto Rico, but they don't know what else to do.  Just the fact that Canada may finally get free trade between provinces like is normal between countries tells you something.  Flailing like Carney embracing chatbots (but they are provided by US or Chinese companies, run on US cloud services, and embody the values of the US elite) or promising 5% defense spending (but will that include a stronger electrical grid and emergency response services; and wait, if climate change is a major security threat, why try to shove pipeline projects where people don't want them at RCMP gunpoint) show the extent of the confusion.

Two stories about the absurdity of trying to make the medicine line real: a golf club in New Brunswick whose main access road was in the USA https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/aroostook-valley-country-club-border-issue-ends-1.7608819 and a rural road on the Montana side which was maintained by county workers from Alberta because at least as many Canadians as Americans used it https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/u-s-blocking-canadian-access-to-road-southern-alberta-county-has-long-relied-on-1.7602645

BC Conservative leader John Rustad has accused some of the breakaway MLAs of trying to blackmail their former colleagues https://vancouversun.com/news/john-rusted-bc-conservative-mla-blackmail-accusations  He then walked back the exact accusation https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/rustad-blackmail-claim-opposition-caucus-1.7571750

Came across someone in a history FB group advertising his book on "medieval history" which actually seems to be an explicit ultra-Catholic argument for the restoration of monarchy, entitled Missing Monarchy. Kind of rare to see those sorts of sentiments outside their own bubbles.

I am told there is a far-right book by a social media personality with a title or handle like Bronze Age Pervert (and I can kind of grok the John Ringos who fantasize about being warlords who cut a swathe through their enemies by day and amuse themselves with captive women by night, or the people who start a band on go on tour and meet a groupie, but my thoughts on sophists who invent patter and use drugs and cult tactics to get much younger people dependent on them like some of the figures in earlier posts in this thread are not printable). Jordan Peterson has thoughts on Ancient Near Eastern literature.

A characteristic of the current phase of American social media is fringe figures gaining influence in old institutions.  Fifteen or twenty years ago someone very influential on 4Chan or Tumblr (although there was a Tumblr to twitter to the headlines pipeline) would not be given access to the NYT or appointed by a close associate of POTUS.  The visible mental collapse of prominent figures like Rudy Giulianni and Elon Musk also feels new (plenty of prominent people were deeply messed up but they kept it out of the headlines, and if they got in the news like Tiger Woods and his wife they often took a break).

On whether someone with Indian parents born in Uganda and resident in the USA is African-American (Ugandan), I have applied to American universities which try to ask your race without saying race (my ethnicity is Canadian and Anglo but there are never boxes for either).  My thoughts there are also not for the Internet except that I imagine that people interpret the stupid question many different ways and that people with all kinds of ancestry might get lumped in as "black"  or "Hispanic" in the USA depending on circumstances (a pale-skinned Mexican in a business suit who speaks excellent English might be safer than a working-class tourist from Calabria drunk on real American whiskey).  One way I heard it explained is that if you leave it blank they can guess your race, if you enter it they have to trust it.  Lots of people have toyed with "is a white South-African or a Tunisian African-American?" or more interestingly "is an immigrant from Kenya African-American if she is not part of Black culture but has more encounters with police than most of us on this forum can imagine?"

An establishment rag in NYC just shared a leak on the current socialist Democratic candidate for Mayor of NYC from Crémieux Receuil, a race crank Twitter and Substack personality who the Guardian thinks is a graduate student named Jordan Lasker. Receuil was among those who recently sued RationalWiki to stop saying documented true things about him.  Said rag described him as "an academic and an opponent of affirmative action" not "a blogger obsessed with telling the Internet about the hereditary inferiority of black and Black people." 

Crémieux is part of the network in this thread but I am not going on twitter to work things out (RationalWiki mentioned Richard Hanania, Aporia Magazine, Natal Conference, a Libertarian charter city called Infinita, and something called Manifest in Berkeley where LessWrongers and race 'scientists' network).

I see indications that said candidate is not a great person, but the small-C conservative establishment siding with racists against socialists is how you get Nazi Germany.

Crémieux is sad that guesses about the mayoral race have not moved on the prediction market Polymarket so he presumably tried insider trading and shorted the candidate's chances before the leak https://www.dewereldmorgen.be/community/rassenbiologische-hit-job-op-zohran-mamdani-in-the-new-york-times/ Manifest was billed as about prediction markets but attendees noticed "there are five HBD bloggers among the invited guests and Curtis Yarvin has organized a party"

Supposedly Crémieux has a Reddit handle which begins with a six-letter slur for trans people.  Do none of these people have healthy sexuality which is based on respecting the people they want to take to bed not hating and fearing people who are different from them or seeing them as resources to harvest?  And why did they all spent their youth calling for despicable policies rather than arguing about BSG versus Dr. Who and writing fanfic like normal nerds?

British Columbia now has three populist right-wing parties in the legislature after MLAs pushed out of the official opposition formed their own parties (John Rustad's Conservatives, One BC, and Centre BC) and five parties in the legislature in all (with the NDP and the Greens).

Two MLAs in Alberta are trying to reestablish the Progressive Conservative Party because the governing United Conservative Party has a leader with a brain fried on right-wing podcasts.

I find it deeply shameful how Americans look at the corruption and downright evil of their two established parties, and the fecklessness and folly of the two minor parties, and say "welp, I guess there is nothing we can do" and not create a new party like adults. There are structural obstacles, but the USA went from about 30% of the adult population allowed to vote to 90% in 50 years (numbers are wild-ass guesses but see eg. Wikipedia). Women and Black Americans and Asian-Amercans and Native Americans all had to overcome massive obstacles to get the vote.

The new Liberal PM of Canada is a gullible authoritarian who says whatever he thinks will get him elected but people who read his book saw signs of the former.

Has anyone else encountered the idea of "the big sort" or "the great sort" on American right-wing social media?  The idea that the Invisible Hand of the Market just alots capable people to good jobs? (And don't talk about the state of public education and public health in many places, or how many jobs in say high-status journalism are for the children of the last generation of celebrities and elected officials- people like that also tend to be anxious about chatbots taking jobs).

He Jiankui, the Chinese scientist who claimed he performed human genetic engineering with CRISPR and spent three years in prison for his trouble, is moving to America:

"My new lab in Austin, Texas is being prepared and I'll be settling down there," he said. ... "My mission is still in the field of embryonic genetic editing." ... The controversial figure said he had given up trying to win over conventional academia and intended to spread his influence among his online fans instead. ... His growing rejection of mainstream academia has largely been attributed to his second wife, Cathy Tie – a 29-year-old Chinese-Canadian bioinformatician and entrepreneur who founded Ranomics, a genetic screening company, and Locke Bio, a telemedicine company, in Toronto. ... He also said that Tie had helped to create a cryptocurrency called meme coin to enable public support of his research.

Elon Musk has connections to Austin and several figures in this thread live or have lived there.

At least the Kaiser just let portugaling Lenin out! Would be funny if ICE deports He to a gulag in Honduras for stealing jobs from American mad scientists.

"The only basement abominations i have are old artworks and abandoned hobbies."

"Certified 100% non-Communist by four Communist parties!"

"The most damaging animal to people and livestock is the portugaling Goose"

"Do I need to quote Procopius' Secret History? Because I can quote Procopius' Secret History."

"is that a hard exoskeleton in your pants or are you just happy to see me "

"(Sentimental voice) It was Exilian where I first learned what an ovipositor was."

"So what I am hearing is that you have a catalogue of abominations on your laptop, subcategory Duck."

"You can't unfortunately remove your own skin. Not reversibly."

Unfortunately, the refusal of Americans to control their oligarchs means that you just need to amuse one rich person to make a fringe Internet idea into a global sensation.  And Amazon etc. don't care what they publish or advertise as long as it does not cross a few simple lines.

As far as I am concerned, the whole country is like a pet owner that lets their pit bull chase all the smaller dogs and people at the park.  Utter abandonment of personal responsibility.