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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Okay, what is happening to him is a humanitarian crisis, but they arrested him for driving without a license, not because he missed a turn signal.

    What ICE is doing is abhorrent. We don’t need to exaggerating and/or lie to make horrifying headlines marginally worse.

    Edit - Jesus christ, you all have some real issues with connotation, huh? Yes, he was pulled over for a turn signal, which set off the chain of events, but the intention of the headline is to connect the mostly innoculous act of forgetting to signal to the resulting deportation, when that is blatantly not the case. All the “UMMM, ACKSHUALLY, THIS REALLY DID HAPPEN” completely misses the point here.

    Fuck me for refusing to just let it slide when media uses intentionally misleading titles to invoke extreme reactions for engagement, I guess.






  • Then I believe you I missed the comparison.

    I’m not suggesting that in both cases, a government is doing things to make “bad choices” harder. I’m suggesting that in both cases a government is disproportionately punishing the less wealthy to get what it wants. In neither case does the government gives a shit if you, individually, lead a healthier life or have a child. It wants you to generate more wealth for the country, whether that be by demanding less for health care costs or by producing the next worker drone.

    The point in the sugar tax comparison, a real thing that happened in parts of Canada by the way, is that the government should be reducing the costs of the healthy choices, not making the unhealthy choices more expensive, as people were largely turning to unhealthy choices because they were cheaper and do not have the wealth to make better choices. Likewise, if the Chinese government wants to improve the birth rate of its population, they should make childcare more affordable and look to give parents more wealth/time, not attempt to punish them financially for preventing a pregnancy. Punishing a population that is making the choice you don’t want them to make out of necessity isn’t the solution to get them to make the choice you want. “Poor tax” is never a good solution, and that’s what the comparison is: two versions of “poor tax.”





  • C’mon man, there’s a lot of things to be said for how braindead of a take OP’s is, but throwing slurs around isn’t the play either.

    Or, think about it this way: suggesting they were born facing serious mental and intellectual struggles is excusing their behaviour. This isn’t something they did because they were born unlucky. It’s a choice they made. They should have to own that, and we should hold them accountable as best as we can.



  • To be clear, I am extremely pro-immigration, but many of the immigration policies as written are tools used to suppress wages. This is the reason we see so many immigrants, often with degrees and training we refuse to recognize in Canada, in low paying, minimum wage jobs. I personally had the pleasure of working with a wonderful woman from the middle east who was a qualified teacher, stuck working 30 hours a week in a grocery store deli because we refused to recognize her degree or decade of experience. She spoke perfect English, was incredibly pleasant, and visibly intelligent and well-mannered, but she’s a brown immigrant, so fuck it, minimum wage for her.

    We can take immigrants at the rate we have been while not using them to further wealth inequalities. But as a friend of mine says, the purpose of a system is what it does, and the current iteration is not about creating a multi-cultural nation.

    For additional clarity, this isn’t to say that you’re wrong and immigration isn’t being used as a scapegoat. I’d just argue that the problem is more substantial than simply calling the issue a scapegoat suggests. There is a real problem, but it’s not in that we’re accepting immigrants at all; it’s the conditions we’ve agreed to accept them under.