I understand the view that in rehabilitation from addiction, drugs are not the only factor to consider. But they are absolutely a factor that needs to be considered. Ask anyone who has tried to quit smoking, drinking, or using any drug.

If someone overdoses and almost dies, or harms someone else, I think the state has a responsibility to get that person help that they may not have the ability, knowledge, or desire to seek, as opposed to turning them back out onto the street and waiting for it to happen again. The situation right now where I live is that businesses and homes are stocked with naloxone kits, and citizens are administering lifesaving healthcare to people on death’s door, on the sidewalk. Everyone I know who lives downtown has seen a dead body on the street in the past year. That’s not good, and practical solutions are needed immediately. I’m not convinced that a Swiss bulletin from 1999 which tents its argument on examples from the Vietnam War and the American Civil War really gets to the heart of the current issue and set of circumstances.

The cause of addiction is not drugs.

This is a very strange take.

What evidence do you have for this?

At this point, PR would significantly help the Greens and NDP, and harm the BQ and Liberals badly. The LPC has no interest in doing this. They’re not altruistic. Remember, they forced an election in the heat of the pandemic in order to consolidate power.

They have also proven to be totally uncommitted to top line promises. I don’t really see how they’re a party worth voting for.

Robert Tanguay, an addictions psychiatrist and clinical assistant professor at the University of Calgary, supports involuntary care under certain conditions but also stressed more voluntary treatment options are needed.

Tanguay was a member of Alberta’s Recovery Expert Advisory Panel that helped shape government policy on addiction and mental health care, and said opinions about the efficacy of involuntary care varied.

“The one thing that was all agreed upon is it has to be done compassionately and in the healthcare system, not in the penal system,” Tanguay said. “We can’t just incarcerate people using drugs.”

This makes sense to me.

There’s a risk that police will weaponize an ability to commit someone to involuntary rehab. There’s a risk that overdoses might go unreported because people want to avoid being committed to a facility. The question is if these risks will be outweighed by any benefits. I think it’s unfortunate that these programs aren’t being discussed by political parties in practical terms. There’s just a lot of handwaving about whether or not it will ‘work’, and no real discussion of the objectives and expected outcomes.

As a user, ‘privacy preserving attribution’ is unappealing for a few reasons.

1. It seems it would overwhelmingly benefit a type of website that I think is toxic for the internet as a whole - AI generated pages SEO’d to the gills that are designed exclusively as advertisement delivery instruments.

2. It’s a tool that quantitatively aids in the refinement of clickbait, which I believe is an unethical abuse of human psychology.

3. Those issues notwithstanding, it’s unrealistic to assume that PPA will make the kind of difference that Mozilla thinks it might. I believe it’s naive to imagine that any advertiser would prefer PPA to the more invasive industry standard methods of tracking. It would be nice if that wasn’t the case, but, I don’t see how PPA would be preferable for advertisers, who want more data, not less.

As a user, having more of my online activity available and distributed doesn’t help or benefit me in any way.

One outcome of the possibility that Poilievre finds success in a federal election, is that rhyming and nickname politics will become the norm. Among other things, a CPC government will be tiring and annoying.

I think we’ll have to do some soul searching as a nation if the CPC gains any ground in this election. Like you, I struggle to understand how people don’t see Poilievre as comically idiotic, both from a policy and rhetorical standpoint. He’s such an insincere goof. Though I guess, maybe we’ve been conditioned to insincerity from Ottawa over the past decade.

Great, a provincial special interest party now holds the balance of power in the nation’s Parliament. A crappy day for Canadian democracy.

Much as I dislike the BQ, it has to be said, Blanchet has cajones

“I am happily assuming that if and when the Bloc will bring down the Liberals, Mr. Legault will support the Bloc Québécois”

This isn’t getting called out as the crisis that it really is. Imagine the narrative if any other single province had the influence that the BQ is right now exercising. News outlets would be spinning up the sirens.

You’re right to point out the difficulty of preparing installation media.

Also, for the average person, friction will probably happen during installation - possibly having to circumvent safe boot to install and run a new OS (knowing how to enter the bios, feeling comfortable playing around in the bios, knowing how to even disable safe boot once you’re there, not exposing your device to security vulnerabilities by having safe boot disabled), the need for an existing understanding of how partitions work and how the partitions are structured on your specific device in order to test the waters with a dual boot setup on a drive that has data/functionality you want to preserve. Needing to know the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of swap, /home, and /root partitions. These points all came up on a recent installation, and I’m sure they would scare some people off.

Installation will be easy if you have the time, motivation, existing knowledge and/or bandwidth for a learning curve. But not everybody has that.

And that’s just installation, to say nothing of the actual use of the desktop environment, which is not as intuitive as its often claimed to be.

I hear you.

I’m not sure there is really any vote that a thoughtful person could make that doesn’t involve some sort of moral compromise. There are things in the AB NDP platform that I really like, and there are some things that I’m indifferent to. There are some things I wish weren’t there, and some things that I really wish they made a bigger deal about. Despite that, I’m inclined to vote for them because I align more closely with them than any other provincial party. I think a lot of conservatives feel the same way about the UCP.

Again, I’m not trying to justify UCP policy in any way whatsoever. Kenney and Smith are both fools, and have made the province measurably worse for almost everybody. Despite that, I don’t think Alberta should be written off in a casual way. And I don’t think even a UCP voter should necessarily be written off. No matter what side of the aisle you’re on, a political choice is a balancing act of competing interests and aims.

Sorry, thank you for the correction on the number of petitioners. I didn’t read the article carefully enough. From the article:

The total number of petitioners submitted to the Town of Barrhead landed at 851, with the total accepted petitioners coming out to 712.

For the record I don’t like what the UCP are doing in Alberta right now either, and I don’t think their approach represents acceptable governance.

You didn’t infer this, but I want to say for the record that it would be incorrect to infer, that just because the UCP received 54-ish% of the popular vote in the last provincial general election, it doesn’t follow that 54% of the population of Alberta is anti-trans. The UCP as a political entity takes aggressive stances on a bundle of issues that rationally-minded conservative voters would (and do) find unappealing. The fact that a Conservative stronghold like Barrhead could only get 10% of its citizens behind this petition goes to show that this kind of thinking is overwhelmingly not the norm here among the citizens.

The town of Barrhead has a population of 4320 people. Only 10% of the town petitioned for this as-yet-unpassed bylaw. Those individuals don’t even represent the town of Barrhead, much less the entire province.

I don’t mean this personally - I’m surprised that someone who is as vocal about proportional representation as you are would be insensitive to the demographic facts of this matter.

If were going to have a public health system, people should be required to take care of themselves

On the face of it, this sounds sensible. But, thinking more deeply, who should decide the required amount of care a person ought to take? Ideas about what it means to ‘take care of yourself’ are varied. And consider that some citizens of this country are simply unable to take the same personal health decisions that others have the privilege to take without a second thought.

What you’re talking about here isn’t a public system. A healthcare system that only serves certain chosen people is not public in any meaningful sense.

A public healthcare system is imperfect on the whole, but on average, when funded and administered properly, is structured to apportion care based on need, instead of the profit motive. I think that’s worthwhile, and the right thing for a society to do from a moral standpoint.

At this rate, it won’t be long before Poilievre is speaking in full limerick. What an idiot.

The unspoken subtext in Trudeau’s comment is of course “they’re playing silly games while I’m running the country”. Trudeau’s only available response to the end of the supply and confidence agreement is to downplay its significance, while avoiding looking like a bitter jackass. Ironically, his comment is itself exactly the kind of ‘politics’ he’s accusing the other party leaders of practicing. It’s image management, that’s it.

I disagree. And also I don’t understand how your comment is relevant to the conversation. Making a non sequitur like this isn’t constructive. So, nice try but, you will not divide us!

Poilievre is making a string of very strange political gambles. Doing the rhyming nickname thing, trying to look like a cool badass, going on a string of unusual, foolish-looking, public attacks against rivals.

If the Conservatives don’t do as well as expected in the federal election, I wonder what’s next for them, from a leadership, attitude, and policy standpoint.

This will be Gen Z’s first real federal election to participate in. I’m very interested to see their impact. Convention is to assume that the young won’t vote, but, life and livelihood for the youth in Canada has never been worse, at least in my lifetime.

TFW your election campaign was provably targeted by hostile foreign powers because your foreign policy positions are contrary to their aims and goals.

From a policy standpoint, disengagement is the worst possible strategy. Worse than engagement, and far worse than developing proactive foreign policy in the face of constant foreign interference.

Canada needs to create a foreign agent registry, and establish more sophisticated systems to combat and sanction foreign interference in our political and cultural spaces. For fuck sake, we know for a fact that right now, we have a sitting Member of Parliament (Han Dong) who has their seat as a result of Chinese state influence into their candidacy. The fact that we lack the mechanisms, or the political will, or both, to do something about this, is insanity.