I recognize that speech is never free when the place it is conducted is owned by shareholders.

It may sound odd but this could actually be a sea change moment for a lot of people. Having been stuck around far right coworkers enough a lot of them have hung their hats on the whole “free speech” lynchpin. That’s the thing they condemn leftist spaces for doing, that’s the hill thwy will die on. Their sycophantic love of Musk is bound up in the idea that he’s some kind of champion of free speech. This likely is the rude shock some of them might need to realize that was never true.

Is it going to get them to revisit their whole worldview? Probably not. But it’s a crack in the facade.

In the articles I have read the terms “raised alarms” does a lot of work. Yes a lot of Christian groups “raise alarms” but that’s a little toothless when there is a history of a lot of sects believing that suicide, regardless of it’s circumstances, is a gateway to hell. The median age of people taking up the offer on assisted suicide is at age 78.

We as a country have a massive die off occurring as the youngest of the Baby Boomers, one of the biggest ever generations in our country’s history… Is now reaching retirement age. There is a steep change in how the body ages and metabolizes things around age 60 and there’s a bit of an expected die off that accompanies that change. Considering the Canadian government and population is particularly sensitive to watchdoging any potential genocide or eugenics programs the system is designed with a lot of checks and balances. You need two doctors who are unrelated to each other’s practice to sign off on even starting the process which takes about a year to complete if you are not terminally ill. Any particular spikes in pairs of potentially colluding doctors who sign off together on the paperwork too often trigger an investigation.

Part of the cultural development of the last two decades has been fallout from the government admiting that they and the Catholic Church were jointly responsible for a genocide of the indigenous peoples. While keeping a weather eye on the program is merited a lot of the controversy is more towards the end of people wanting a scary bogeyman to point to in order to erode faith in the Government when really the system is one that was heavily advocated for and was very carefully designed. While concern is natural… It’s also good to do the reading to explore the depths of the system’s design and implementation and know that it was from the get go in conversation with ethical watchdogs and is under review since it’s inception to monitor the effect it is having. “Somebody warns scary numbers are scary” is basically the imperative of the media who only gets paid when you pay attention to them and scary, half explained things is one of the noisemakers that is effective.

As a Canadian who has watched a loved one die very slowly and spent a fair amount of time in hospice I changed my mind about wanting to fight to the bitter end.

My mother in law was a lovely lady, but unable to really face her death. Seeing what others were going through she begged us to not let that be her but the rules are she and she alone needed to sign off on the paperwork while she was lucid. We couldn’t set that up for her, she needed to do it herself… And she couldn’t face it and she missed her window.

The last week of her life was hell. She was so weak from not eating due to her cancer that she fell and hurt her hip. Thing people don’t really tell you about wasting away is your brain essentially becomes too energy expensive to run. She lost the ability to understand what was going on around her and had to be restrained in the bed so she wouldn’t try to get up and she, unable to interpret what was happening, started making escape attempts throughout the day and night frequently crying in pain. She begged like a small child for us to help her and looked at us like monsters because we couldn’t. She had been one of the most staunchly independent people I had known and she spent her last week in agony and all of us were powerless watching knowing it was the last thing she wanted.

I was so thankful for the Hospice care. I realized it could have been so much worse if her care was expensive or wasn’t handled with such an incredible standard of compassion… But the experience left all of us close to my MIL more than a little traumatized.

It’s important to realize that these decisions are intensely personal. I would not wish what happened to my MIL on my worst enemy. Depictions of death in media do not adequately prepare you for the potential realities of every situation. That perceived duty to live as long as you can isn’t always a kindness.

You are partially correct. Judges are allowed to perform marriages in their off hours as they are ordained to do so.

Big HOWEVER here…

Courthouse weddings are an offered service of the state. These judges are officially on the clock to perform these services which are booked through government infrastructure meaning that when they are performing this service they do so as government employees operating on Government funding. This is provided by the Government as a means to make marriage accessible to all protected legally marriagable couples. When a judge is engaged this way this is specifically what they are being paid by the government to employ their time. They cannot spend their time on other matters.

Lets be clear here. This is not a “health care ban for minors”. If you are under 18 and you are looking for gender related care - which can include psychological support you require the consent of all involved parents and guardians and a licenced medical professional.

The average team who all have to agree for a young trans person’s gender health to go forward and continue forward is as follows.

• Guardians : need to be supportive, willing and be capable to demonstrate informed consent.

• Pediatric Doctor : Serves as the baseline General practitioner since a young person’s body development has specific differences from an adult.

• Psychiatric Doctor : To repeatedly assess whether the young person is a good candidate and adhering to diagnostic frameworks of similar cases to lessen risks should there appear to be any oddities or reticence in continuing.

• Social Case Worker : Investigates the child’s relationship between parents and guardians to make sure coercion is not at play.

• Endocrinologist : In the event of pursuing hormones or blockers this specialist observes the process and paitents must routinely go in to make sure no adverse effects are occurring.

Any of these parties may revoke their endorsement for treatment if something appears to not be going to plan. It is this panel OF ADULTS who consult and operate with informed medical consent that these laws are stripping the choices to pursue recognized treatment plans from. Not minors who are by default powerless if these adults do not align with their wishes.

So he’s fine if we remove all toilet paper from bathrooms. How he wipes his ass is his parent’s responsibility right?

Oh it happens. We as a community aren’t all angels. Some of us get very VERY warped by religious or cultural trauma where because the base assumption is that we are monsters already by virtue of being something shameful there is a lowered boundary to other shamed behaviours…

But what stops that shame spiral is normalizing queer identities and creating good community with good praxis. Consent is king in so many queer spaces where I am because we’ve all basically had to imbibe the lessons of therapy to rescue people out of the dark. We discuss gold standards of sexual health and behaviour and conduct with frankness and lack of shame because generations of us were abandoned to places where we were vulnerable to exploitation. To become a pdf file is to lose your community as nothing is so disgusting to people in queer spaces as someone who would cause that kind of damage as it is expected that you know exactly what the knock on effects of that act are.

There is a fair amount of speculation that being bi is actually way more common than is generally thought but because current cultural rules of compulsory heterosexuallity codes being bi as being something you must act on to actually be considered that identity a lot of people believe that they are straight simply because they never acted on the attraction.

For guys the comp-het mindset also tends to discount basically any situation where they feel dominant because “straight” and “masculine” to them basically means that as long as they are the petetrative element in a place of absolute control via power dynamics or violence then it doesn’t count as “gay”. Essentially since as long as it holds no emotional attachment to them it doesn’t count. As long as they can’t code their behaviour as “feminine” it doesn’t count.

Which to the rest of us is fucking bonkers…

That urban sprawl mechanism getting nixed is one of the better things to occur. Since maintaining roads, electric and water lines, fire safety coverage and so on are government expenditures this densifing initiative they have going is actually pretty on point.

Problem is the government doesn’t want to upset the applecart for those who invested in the family home by cratering their portfolios so they are doing everything they can to mince around homeowners so the initiative to cool the market is the softest most delicate corrections they can manage. That sort of approach is gunna take a long time to work and is going to be vulnerable as hell to NIMBY counter initiatives. It’s good to see the government is getting more creative with time but until everyone recognizes that property investing was built on risks one signed on when you bought the sort of big actions needed aren’t going to serve up a fix unless the bubble bursts on it’s own.

As a Socialist that subscribes more to the historical strain of Saint Simone and Robert Owen that broke out and away early from Marxism to become the Chartist movement and the history of American non-Marxist socialism … I am often tired of how one note Tankies are. They seem obsessed with a sort of internal purity which denies a rich history of socialism other than Marx and Engles. Once one of them goes off about Stalinism or Maoism I basically just disengage because at that point they are basically so enamored with the aesthetics of communism that they aren’t going to be listening to anything. They want to be devout to the ideology while whitewashing the bloodstains of past failures. I understand a collectivist mindset is more or less what Marx aims to cultivate in his work but it seems often at the cost of tolerance of any level of apostasy.

The flattening of a mass of political thought into cardboard cuttouts to snipe at and sneering at the range of Socialism hybrids with No True Scotsman flavour condescension as political ideologies simply not complete worldviews in their own right has got me rather depressed in dealing with the average Communist on here. People in general often just seem to want to find something simple and easy to hate.

I dunno if anyone is interested but of you got some spare coins laying around the Canadian based charity Rainbow Refugee has been helping get out threatened LGBTQIA+ folks from multiple countries including Russia for quite a while now by arranging sponsorships and legal support and advice for LGBTQIA asylum seekers. If you know anyone looking to get out or would like to donate here’s a link :

https://www.rainbowrefugee.com/