Well yes… Because liberalism if very forward in enabling a lot of personal property rights and is generally in tension with socialism. We’ve had an awfully long period of treating liberalism as the air we breathe.

But whenever we talk about liberalism it is important to remember it’s a whole package deal of a host of distinct concepts that were basically come up with by the handful of people who claimed the school of thought. It encompasses such vastly differing sources as the spirit of the French Revolutionaries declaring the Rights of Men AND the class obsessed, monarchy friendly, property rights forward English intelligencia. Liberalism holds within it a multitude of characters and we are seeing some of the design flaws now but in it’s day it was a radical dissolution of power of the state from an authoritarian norm that is alien to our modern sensibilities.

Liberalism has become a dirty word by virtue of it basically being compatible with a variable degree of capitalism and we are in an age of unchecked capitalism. Personally I think a balance of heavy socialism and very moderated liberalism to keep power from tipping too much towards state consolidation is actually pretty stable. But I think people like the emotional fire of the Communists writers because it’s evocative and because throwing everything in the trash and starting over speaks to the anger of feeling disenfranchised.

This is not correct. Rights are a construct of human law that can be traced to a series of foundational legal documents and structures of government processes. It evolved out of the privileges given by royalty to variable degrees of their subjects into the ideas foundational to liberalism and other political philosophies of humanitarian ethics which established an idea of aspects of human life and choices that were sacrosanct from government interference or entitlements citizens have in their systems. You have probably heard of the phrase “God given rights” but that is more or less just a saying that came from the concept of rights becoming such a social norm that one considers them the air we breathe.

Religious individuals, from personal experience, tend to have an issue grocking the idea that ethics are not dependent on the idea of a God outright telling you what is good or bad - secular ethics isn’t about what gets you punished or not by an authority. It determines what is correct based off of different rubrics based on the individual school of ethics one applies. More often ethical systems, including modern law systems, are based out of some idea of empathy towards harm and struggles in life divorced entirely from the idea of punishment by a divine being.

Rights are also place dependent because they are built into the law system of whatever country you are in. If you are in China for instance you do not have a right to free speech, the Government can censor you or exact retribution for trying to publish or communicate certain things. Like any law though just cuz it’s on the books doesn’t mean it’s in play. Russia technically has a right to free speech but their courts basically ignore infringement on it when it suits them to do so.

There is an idea of an international code of human rights… But really it is still considered a lower priority than the idea of individual nation sovereignty so protection of those rights is toothless and it is effectively more like gold star guidelines put forward by committee than actual rules.

Bit weird to so publicly and enthusiastically proclaim you’d tap that, but whatever I guess.

My hometown has a bookstore like this. It’s open every day of the year and was the first business in the town to display a pride flag. The lady who runs the store is a bloody hometown hero who is forefront to organizing both the small town Pride and the Mural festival. They partner with the local animal shelter to foster adoptable cats in the store and whenever you purchase a book you get a poker chip to determine where a small portion of the sale gets donated to pick between three non-profit options.

It sells all manner of gifts from quill pens and fancy dice to LGBTQIA+ jewelry and does new and used books. Back before other businesses started showing support as being safe places it was the one. The town it is in is majority conservative and the people who work and frequent the shop are known to be grassroots fighters who show up to city councils to fight for all manner of progressive causes. Whenever I go back to my hometown I visit that store and I buy at least one glossy new book or a cool set of dice.

It has not been easy as over the years the store has been physically attacked. It’s had windows smashed and employees targeted by bigots… But everytime I’m in there I see happy faces on teens and adults excitedly browsing or chatting who love the place.

It is possible to make these places but it requires a lot of support. It’s not enough to just run a business, you gotta make a networked community who protects you back.

There’s a hidden usage of “hon” from the history of the toxic trans communities message boards to mean “trans women who don’t pass” and is used condescendingly. That usage is basically dead in the water and barely known outside of a pretty narrow sliver of the queer community but it can still get you a side eye in some places.

I feel like I have watched in real time as Y’all has gained usage up in the Canadian Queer community.

I am old enough to still regard “hon” as demi hostile but “dude” seems to be drifting more and more gender neutral. At heart we may all just be ninja turtles all the way down

Honestly… You were voting for a Hitler that would destroy protections and target vulnerable people on your home soil as scapegoats or a group who can be counted on at least to uphold the freedoms you and vulnerable groups have as a citizen on paper. Those were the only two choices you had. You can rail about how sub par your choice was but in the end you had two… and you didn’t fear the one you needed to enough in my opinion.

You can continue to beat your fists about how shit the Democrats were but if you wanted more options then that was not your moment to demand them. As one who is LGBTQIA+ in Canada with a lot of American friends I know so many people who are now scared for their lives and livelyhoods who are abandoning marriage plans in favour of courthouse weddings and are scrambling to try and get visas. I know the realities of them finding long term safety here is a shit shoot and I am trying to do what I can. I am seeing the cost of people I know upending their lives because they no longer feel safe. I was here for months beforehand listening to so many people looking at this two choice system and treating the election like a game of chicken. I am so personally angry because so many of you might as well have said “Well that’s a rainbow colored sacrifice I’m willing to make.”

I might not be the one to try and justify how Democrats were not good enough for you because that wasn’t the question you were being asked.

I mean, I am Canadian and have been writing my MPs for literally years now and doing what rabble rousing I can but it really is a ridiculously hard system to crack. It was everybody’s election promise 10 years ago back when Trudeau was first elected and I am a part of a group of people whose rage has been simmering like the surface of the sun for decades.

Getting people to actually UNDERSTAND first past the post as a systemic weakness it is and to buy into electoral reform is grassroots hell. One thing you have going for you is that essentially the entire system is breaking down and is cause for immediate genuine alarm which if you do this right should light a fire under your asses to actually march and DEMAND change.

They didn’t vote for Trump - they misunderstood the system that was in place.

Republican citizen groups have been going over the rolls in key states and removing by challenge registered Democrats who had any small errors on their registration sowing confusion and making otherwise eligible people ineligible.

Republican resources were used to amplify third party candidates who never had a hope of success due to the nature of construction of the system to create spoiler effects. If you thought Jill Stein was a real electable option you can look back at prior elections.

The concept of moral abstention from this election removed people who otherwise would have voted Democrat as the lesser of two possible evils from the system.

Basically since First past the post is a winner take all system Even if 70 percent of the public hates the Republican platform all they have to do is win a majority voting share, that doesn’t mean they have to win your vote. They just have to mean that they have to remove your vote from supporting their main competition. They can do that via sowing apathy or divison or by changing the structure of the voting process through gerrymandering and other tactics that any dedicated volunteer can do if they are willing to slog under the assumption that what they are doing is ethically sound “payback”. The fact is that these voting systems do not support the will of a majority and both established parties have benefited from that historically… But Republicans stopped playing by the rules awhile ago and they are marketing masters.

Since Republicans have basically outlined their goals to destroy the checks and balances of the system of government basically all they needed was to keep up the ruse that the system somehow rewards people who act outside of the two party choice the system was designed to deliver. Democrats, hoping to play the long game couldn’t out the system they have benefitted from as being a rigged game if they wanted it to continue … So anything but a vote for a Democratic candidate was basically automatically an increase in share to the Republicans by virtue of subtraction hence why a lot of us are unhappy…particularly those of us who tried to explain this shit beforehand and were told we were scum for supporting genocidal regimes. I don’t like Democrats but they at least support the Laissez-faire systems that allow leftists to utilize their power as private citizens to support foreign intervention. I don’t give a snowball’s chance in hell that the support people have managed to give Palestinian interests thusfar will be able to continue at all under the Republicans.

It’s not just that.

One thing that the Republicans got real good at was piping the idea of election fraud into their base. Part of what they’ve been doing is getting devoted citizens to target individuals they suspect to be democrat friendly and pouring over their registration paperwork. If they find anything amiss they report it which has made it nessisary to show up and defend one’s right to vote to the administrative bodies on a schedule.

https://youtu.be/CkK3W0lOKcc?si=OT4mOCnlZosTGbld

It’s meant that relatively small wildcat groups of citizens have managed to target literal tens of thousands of voters in swing states to cause confusion and delegitimize voters based on minute errors.

They find new ways to rig the game because they believe that they are owed this.

Yes I do. Because The situation in Gaza was not an election issue for Biden. There was a fantastic amount of campaigning, a lot of it bought and paid for, that turned that genocide into a single issue vote with tis holier than thou reaction of withdrawal from the entire system toted as the answer. It is political suicide to run a mainstream Pro-Palistine presidential campaign in the US. A candidate of one of the two main parties need unilateral support from their donation streams and encumbant systems and the Republicans knew that. They know that’s the devil’s bargain every DNC candidate has to sign to even get a shot.

Republican money supported Jill Stein to serve as a spoiler candidate to engage those with a naive veiw of the system but still wanted to vote and then they helped pipe that message through all manner of socials that if enough people withold their vote then Kamala would have shift her position… Because they knew how enticing that is. The idea that you don’t have to compromise your integrity and that that will be rewarded. They turned this into a single issue campaign for so many people knowing that they didn’t need to shift their position even a little. They could let their Red capped demogogues talk about literally beheading people and those high on this intoxication of absolute righteousness would ONLY care about an issue that Republicans can flaunt their support in favor of.

It was misplaced moral superiority in part that got us here because if you were lulled into not voting or voting third party because one candidate wasn’t “leftist enough” when the alternative is someone popular with an entrenched imobile base of support who wants to make sure leftistism dies dead then you failed to get the assignment.

It wasn’t ‘voter apathy’ it was a misplaced sense of voter moral superiority. It’s the thing leftist rhetoric has been weak to for a very long time. That love of withholding support except for perfection. The idea that compromise or chosing a lesser evil from two bad options dirties you. It doesn’t matter what you lost if you personally took “the high ground”.

This cutting of our noses to spite our face was exploited all to shit this election. They lulled people by appealing to the same zeal of righteousness that they know divides us fundamentally knowing that when push comes to shove people will turn up their noses on principle of not being personally catered to and forget that their ability to help at all is contingent on the freedoms that one party was explicitly putting on the chopping block.

It will be a while before people can admit that they were duped and there’s a lot of fault to go around, particularly in those funded astroturf campaigns designed to bait the hook… The right have been watching us for the past decade they knew how to divide us and it is on US that so many of us fell for it.

Hey, cis normative passing trans person here (in my case my long time partner has a phenotype preference and I chose him rather than physical transition) you are not betraying anybody. It is a hard road any of us walk and your decision, whatever it’s reason, is valid. We are going to need solidarity like never before and that doesn’t mean pointing fingers at ourselves or others and lamenting that our sacrifices don’t look the same. It means being kind to ourselves too. We are all going to need each other.

Oh, it’s worse than that for Canada. Trump during his last term tanked entire sectors of our economy with executive orders he spat out like tweets. Those “deals” were all taken apart in International court filings but the damage was already done.

Remember we are a very big landmass staffed by only a sliver more people than exist in the state of California. If the US goes under we will be ripped apart as no more than collateral damage.

Uh huh. I hope that continues to feel worth it.

And that’s great on a personal level, but what did it do in terms of this choice where Gaza was not featured but the possibility of a second genocide on your doorstep or the death of the democratic process that protects your right to protest and send that aid at all was being happily speculated on?

Okay… And what did you do here to move the needle on the Gaza issue? Holding your breath and turning blue feels like a moral high ground sure. But what did you actually do?

Conservatism is a worldwide problem and they all borrow each other’s notes. It’s not going to be a fun time for us coming up. I can only hope that when the shit hits the fan down there those up here start rethinking their bullshit.

Not saying our shit doesn’t stink but there’s a certain matter of scale to consider. Leastaways we don’t have nukes we can hand over to the psychopath we are looking at voting in.

The national identity of being Canadian over the last while has been every four years wondering if the downstairs neighbors are going to decide to restart up the meth lab they keep tinkering with and bracing for the sounds of domestic violence to resume.