No thanks.

Israel and the EU are prop rep and they went hard right.

Prop rep only looks good on a spreadsheet, it’s terrible when you consider power dynamics.

First of all the parties have all of the power in a prop rep system. There really isn’t any point in even having seats other than to make it appear like a legislature instead of what it really is. A coalition formed in a backroom in when the parties in that coalition hold all of the power and the parties outside of it may as well not be there.

The seats belong to the party, not individuals representing communities. Which means the MP can’t cross the floor if their party is going to screw over their community. They can resign but then the Party appoints someone else to sit in the seat and that person votes the way the party tells them to.

The biggest problem with First Past the Post is the name. If you call it a Community Representation system (which is what it is) it sounds a lot nicer doesn’t it? You vote for a person to represent your community you put pressure on them to put pressure on their party and on Parliament to make the necessary compromises and concessions in the best interests of the community.

Minority interests can more easily be ignored in a Prop Rep system than in a Community representation system. In a community representation system, a thousand votes in a riding can swing it and that means any party can lose seats if they ignore minority interests. In a Prop Rep system even an million votes from minorities are meaningless if the party they vote for isn’t part of the ruling coalition.

Would you really want Canada being run by a coalition between the CPC and PPC where all power rests in the ruling coalition? Where the CPC has to give the PPC what they ask for to maintain power? This is the situation in Israel right now, and it may soon be how it is in the EU.

If you want electoral reform maybe push for ranked choice voting instead of a Prop Rep system that’s currently failing in some very high profile ways in other parts of the world.

I prefer to cancel the apocalypse.

Or if there must be an end times there should at least be giant robots.

Closer to 1C at the moment, but here’s a graph if you want to compare temperature changes over the last century.

https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/?intent=121

The trouble with going back further is that there wasn’t global coverage of people keeping accurate records of temperatures in times past. So they have to look at things like tree rings and make comparisons with historical records. Obviously it gets a little fuzzy going back more than a century. But here’s an xkcd that gives a summary of what we know about historical (and pre-historical) global temperatures.

https://xkcd.com/1732/

Nope I honestly don’t know what your point is. You gravitate towards absolutes more than most religious extremists do. Like if you’re not an omnipotent being with every power you can imagine then you have no choices? But then you also think that the fact that world is some primitive video game where there’s only very simple A) B) C) style options it would be a paradise and you’re angry at God because the world doesn’t work like that. Personally I find it frustrating when a video game limits my options to that degree and the option I want simply isn’t there. Doesn’t feel like I really have a choice if I’m only allowed to do the things they were considered to be valid options by someone else.

Yeah having choices makes for problems, but those are our problems to deal with.

This is a false equivalence. If I burn down a building, it’s been destroyed even if the matter of the building still exists.

And the atoms from that burnt building will go elsewhere and allow for the creation of new life. Nobody ever teach you about the circle of life, Simba?

Because this line of thinking isn’t coherent.

I think we’re basically done here. You’re just rejecting facts that conflict with your inflexible world view now. Atheists have killed a great many people in history, that’s a fact. You reject that fact because you want to believe that religion is the source of everything bad in the world. Can’t face the reality that a lot of evil has been done without religion being a factor, and a lot of evil has been done by people that think of religion similarly to how you think of it. It’s almost as if intolerance is the problem and it’s the same problem if it’s coming from a religious person as it is when it comes from an atheist. Being intolerant towards all other beliefs than your own doesn’t make you better than others, even when if you do everything you can to deny that you have beliefs.

There will always be limits on people’s choices. I don’t have wings, I cannot choose to fly. I don’t own a nuke, I cannot choose to nuke something.

You can choose to fly because airplanes exist. Note how people can choose to use for transportation or use them to drop bombs or crash them into buildings with thousands of people inside.

Also nuclear weapons exist and people can choose to drop them on cities and many thousands of people will die.

It feels like you’re desperately trying to miss the point to avoid having thoughts that conflict with your current belief (or non-belief if that’s how you choose to term it)

That would appear to be blatantly false. The universe constantly is destroying things. Celestial bodies get destroyed every day. Stars die, black holes consume, planets get bombarded with rocks from space. This planet alone has had 5 mass extinction events.

Matter can’t be created or destroyed and energy cannot be created or destroyed. Matter can be converted into energy (and vice-versa) but nothing is ever really destroyed. Do you consider this to be a religious belief simply because conflicts with your argument?

When it is ultimately a force for suffering, yeah absolutely.

How much suffering was caused by the religious oppression done by atheists like Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot? It’s not just religious people that causes suffering. I’m pretty sure it’s intolerance of the beliefs of others that the root of all of that suffering, which history has demonstrated that atheists are more than capable of. So I’m asking again, is your intolerance of the beliefs of others making the world a better place?

It’s not all that different from the Convoy Protests in 2022. People being upset about a problem and having a get together to have a shared emotional meltdown in a location that will obviously accomplish nothing. The Canadian government couldn’t dictate border crossing policies to the US and mask mandates were done at the provincial level. Antivax protests happened throughout the Pandemic and were largely ignored. The Convoy Protests on the other hand interfered with some Canadian’s rights to freedom from “discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.” Imagine being an Asian person living in a neighbourhood taken over by a “China Virus” kind of group. They also interfered with people’s rights to mobility within the country by blocking roads, and did things like jam emergency response numbers which if it were allowed to continue could have taken away people’s fundamental right to be alive.

So it’s kind of a pickle for a government when there’s a group when a group of people exercising their rights is taking away other people’s rights. Through action the government may be infringing on one group’s rights, but through inaction may be infringing on another group’s rights.

Ultimately the Emergency Act was invoked and the Convoy group was removed from Ottawa.

So this protect needs to be given the same consideration. Does the university administration have any influence over foreign policy? I think the answer is clearly no. Two subway stops from U of T there is an Israeli Consulate. So why are they protesting at the University instead of at the Consulate?

Obviously the focus of this “protest” isn’t to effect any kind of change. It’s a social get together that allows some kids to have a shared emotional tantrum. While I’m sure this may be fun and could be cathartic for those in attendance, much like the Convoy “protests” makes it a little less about exercising freedom of expression and closer to having a social gathering on someone else’s property. Have the set up bouncy castles like the Convoy idiots has at their Protest?

And like how we considered the treatment of Asians in the community the Convoy occupied, we also need to consider the rights of people in the U of T community. Is there an ethnic or religious group facing discrimination from these protesters? Is people’s freedom of movement being affected by this protest?

This is Canada we don’t just give the loudest people all of the rights to the detriment of everyone else’s rights. Everyone’s rights must be considered. And given that this “protest” (much like the Convoy “protest”) more resembles a social gathering than an actual protest (it’s happening two subway stops from the Israeli consulate!) the property rights of the University and the rights of Jews facing discrimination from this group might carry more weight.

You’ve missed the point of the example situation. Throwing the jar at a person’s head isn’t one of the available choices.

You’re missing the point of free will. Putting a limit on people’s choices is the antithesis of free will. I can make the choice to use the jam to make a sandwich, I can sell the jam, I can throw the jam in the garbage, and yeah, I can throw a jar of jam at someone if I choose. Some of these options are better than others, but free will means I make the choice, the choice isn’t made for me.

If free will was really so important to create us with, god could have done so in a manner similar to the humanized people from the book.

Free will is important since it’s the essence of creation. If we didn’t have free will we’d all just be an extension of God, not distinct beings. If there are no distinct consciousness, then it would be just God and nothing else. If there’s no distinct consciousness then there’s nothing really created. It would be all just thoughts of a single being.

For there to be distinct consciousness there needs to be the capability to make choices, which means there’s there’s the capability to make bad choices. For me to be incapable of throwing a jar of jam at you there would need to be an omnipotent being governing my decisions. But doing that would take away my agencies and destroy free will. Destroying things is the opposite of creation, which would be against everything God is supposed to be.

Just as we are capable of making choices, God is also capable of making choices. Choice is something that an omnipotent being should be capable of, right? God’s choice to not interfere with our consciousness is inseparable with the creation of free will.

On the other hand, the false belief in a tri-omni god is in fact a prerequisite for a number of religions, and therefore are indeed weird superstitions deserving of mockery.

And that is your choice. God isn’t going to stop you from making this choice. But is mocking other people’s beliefs making the world a better place?

If you didn’t have beliefs it would be impossible for me to offend your beliefs.

I am hungry. I decide to make myself a sandwich, with peanut butter, and one of the following:

strawberry jam
honey
grape jelly

None of these are evil, yet they are choices.

If I throw a jar of strawberry jam at your head, is that not an evil choice? You chose to make a sandwich with that jam, but someone else can choose to do something evil in the same situation.

Those problems do not prove math and science to be false, as they do not challenge fundamental assumptions.

If you’re saying that it’s only because you don’t really understand them. Mathematics was widely assumed to be complete, consistent, and decidable and then Alan Turing’s Halting Problem came along and blew that out of the water. So it’s been mathematically proven that not everything in mathematics is provable. Seems paradoxical to me! I guess that means the field of mathematics is just a weird superstition we should mock, right?

Sorry, forgot that implying atheists behave similarly to religious people is blasphemy to the atheist belief system.

Could you direct me to the nearest atheist confessional so I can confess my sins? But not one with Richard Dawkins, if I wanted to confess to a pedo, I’d just go to a Catholic confessional LOL.

There can’t be free-will if there wasn’t any choice. If there there are choices, there is the potential for evil choices.

So it’s kinda like saying “if God is all powerful could He create a mountain on Earth but also make it so the Earth is a perfect sphere?” It’s just pointing out that a planet that’s a perfect sphere wouldn’t have mountains and a planet with mountains are not perfect spheres. Which isn’t exactly deep philosophical thought that needs a flow chart.

Also if proving something about religion is paradoxical proves that religion is wrong, by the same logic proving something about math or science is paradoxical proves those are wrong. Halting Problem? Math is false! Schrodinger’s Cat? Physics is false!

But outside atheist dogma, most people accept there are things about the universe that are paradoxical. The Halting Problem doesn’t mean we should discard mathematics, Schrodinger’s Cat doesn’t mean we discard Physics. Following this trend means that all of the efforts by atheists to point out paradoxes in religion doesn’t accomplish anything.

Yeah this is a much better point. In theory you want people that are their top of their field to be in these positions.

I think you’ve lost the thread here.

I’m sorry but I won’t be supporting your candidacy to represent my riding. You’re just lacking in the ability to connect with people.

Maybe if you work on your people skills you’ll have a better chance next time.

Just watch watch Jordan Klepper’s interviews with MAGAs for a bit.

If you can’t influence these people how would you go about influencing people to vote for you?

Seems like you might be projecting a little bit here. You want it to be you that has the fame and the power instead of them. You’ve indicated how you’re incapable of influencing others, and you only think in terms of power and notoriety. You equate democracy to an oligarchy. Why would I want to support your candidacy over the candidacy of someone else?

The old George Carlin quote applies. Think of how dumb the average person is, and then think about how half of the people are dumber than that.

Besides that one of the roles of a politician is they need to be able to clearly explain an issue to the public. Most people won’t be able to do this.

Besides our system requires that ever MP win the majority of the votes in a community. If a community is choosing a sociopath to represent them, there isn’t going to be any better way to prevent crazies from getting power. Mostly the problem is people thinking posting complaints on the internet will solve issues rather than getting involved at the community level.

Our system is designed around people working at the community level, if people were willing to put more effort into their community they would have more influence over politics. But the internet makes people feel like they shouldn’t do that so they complain on the internet instead and then complain about their internet complaints aren’t accomplishing anything.

Join a party and choose someone better to run for MP, work to get that person to get elected.

Now you aren’t going to have a say in who represents other communities (they decide for themselves), but you most definitely can have more of a say in who represents yours. But complaining on the internet won’t accomplish this, you will need to put in some effort.

It definitely is a dumb emotional issue in the grand scheme of things, but I feel like I could get by on $194K per year if I were elected MP without being independently wealthy.

CBC article is better: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/solar-eclipse-niagara-falls-1.7159987

Officials say they are concerned the large number of people could overwhelm traffic, emergency services and cellphone networks.

There’s way to declare a state of “we temporarily need additional resources even though it it isn’t actually an emergency.” But since these kinds of scenarios are rare, we probably don’t need such a state to exist so it’s just declaring a “state of emergency.”

Sure it’s called a state of emergency, but the additional resources that are being called in will know the situation so it’s not like it’s going to be martial law in Niagara. There will just be more health care staff, more first responders, more police for crowd control available along with better contingency planning for if the cellphone network gets overloaded.

I suppose we could fault them for not planning sooner, but in fairness politicians aren’t astronomers and even if they did some planning they couldn’t have predicted that media outlets would be promoting Niagara being the best spot to go to see the eclipse.

Also putting out a state of emergency gets more attention in the media than a mayor making a statement saying “we expect traffic jams and a lot of other problems with a lot of people coming, so it might be good for some people to consider viewing it from Hamilton instead?” Getting in the media cycle may result in a lot of people realizing that Niagara might not be the best place to view the eclipse and go elsewhere.

It sounds crazy at first, but it actually is a sensible precaution. Think about if you got a million people there and some accident happens and a bunch of people die because Niagara doesn’t have the resources to handle it.