Short and to the point:

Ragatha.

“I dislike the UCP, therefore, let me make fun of Alberta after a single dead rat is found”

For crying out loud, there’s a million things you can make fun of where I live for, but do you expect this province to have a force field at it’s border that the UCP just switched off? Rats have been found before in this province in isolated cases like this, and it says a lot that I’m nearing 30 and only ever saw a rat once in my life in Ottawa at a pet shop.

Edit: You live in the U.S., maybe get your situation there straightened out before commenting on politics and matters here. We’re not a means for you to feel better about yourself.

It’s one case of a rat. This has happened before on multiple occassions, and in each case the response was prompt.

I’m from here, I can tell you they do a good enough job that the first time I saw one was when I went out of my way to go to a pet store while in Ottawa three months back.

Keeping rats out of people’s homes as pests doesn’t make their lives better?

So owning indiscriminate killing devices isn’t a war crime until they’re actively used?

I need to reiterate. Two bombs killed anywhere from 150,000 to nearly a quarter million people. Who do you think those people were? These aren’t targeted devices, and they’ve only gotten more powerful since they were first dropped 80 years ago.

Yeah, we use them to protect ourselves now. We keep it, we don’t touch it, and it’s on standby to back us up.

However, Putin invading Ukraine was seen as “unthinkable”, regardless of what you think of the conflict there. Trump starting a war with Iran was far from a smart decision, and yet it happened anyway. We may have sanity from our leaders not to press the button now should we acquire a nuke, but what of when someone without sanity comes into power? We create the same cycle that caused us to procure those weapons to begin with, and the arms race continues until suddenly everybody is killing hundreds of thousands of people at the press of buttons.

That’s not enough justification. Why does the logic come down to “but my guy is better”?

I think it’s naive to think that nuclear weapons are justifiable just because someone else has nuclear weapons.

It starts an arms race and makes the overall situation worse. This type of mindset is literally how we got to this point to begin with. The U.S. built up a stockpile of nukes, to which Russia built one up, to which the U.S. built more in turn, so on, so forth.

So yes, I am of the stance still that no we should not have a nuke. Like I said previously, yes it’s bad we’re in a situation where the U.S. has nukes and we’re left in a position where they’re able to use them and we have nothing to dissuade them.

However, just because someone poisoned the punch doesn’t mean we should poison it more. Franz Ferdinand’s assassination in WWI started a chain of events nobody would have predicted lead to the sheer level of conflict it did. Now imagine that with nuclear weapons being exchanged by small and large countries alike.

Why should we partake in the very activity that got us to this situation to begin with? Just because we have trouble getting the big guys to get rid of them doesn’t mean we should throw our hands in the air, give up, and make more of these things.

“it’s coming for you too”

Proceeds to post the most unpopular politicians in the country.

Smith just lost a Conservative stronghold to the NDP, this doesn’t bode well for her.

I disagree with OP calling it fascism to ban it, but people here are forgetting Monero exists and the valid use cases a cryptocurrency like that can have.

Not every cryptocurrency is a scam or a means to manipulate markets. If I’m in a country where I’m doing something objectively good, but still against the law, then cryptocurrency works if it requires finances to operate. See Sci Hub.

Edit: Why was this top of my homepage, I’m just noticing this post is two months old lol.

Cool. Except I don’t expect the U.S. to protect us.

I expect us to not follow their footsteps and become more alike to them by saying “if they have indiscriminate killing machines, we should have them too!”

Non-proliferation isn’t about protection from other countries with weapons. It’s about protection from the weapons themselves in disarmament and collectively deciding that their use is a war crime.

We’re literally basically just saying “if they can commit war crimes and not care, why can’t we?”. I don’t care about Trump when it comes to this, if anything he proves the point that having these weapons is a bad idea for everybody because it takes one bad apple to ruin the cider.

Am I supposed to suddenly agree with nukes because of this?

People are so short-sighted as to knowing the level of carnage these things produce. “It protects us from invasion” is not a valid excuse. Hiroshima and Nagasaki produced levels of indiscriminate killing and torment that we have not seen before or since, and these weapons have only grown more powerful since then.

Having a handful of fault points in the world is better than a million. People keep making the case that it just takes one madman from either the U.S., Russia, or China to launch a nuke.

Can you imagine if we just started allowing everyone to have nukes because we struggled getting the big guys to stop? Do you want Franz Ferdinand’s assassination but with atomic weapons? That’s what you get when start allowing more people to have nukes, and “but our guy is rational” doesn’t cut it as a justification.

Edit: You know, it’s hilarious that I’ve been blocked from responding to the person below’s comment calling me a tankie when at no point did I voice support for China or Russia and literally indicated that it can take a madman from those countries to cause mayhem just as much as it could anywhere else.

I find it so funny that self-described progressives will often drop their stance on war crimes the second you decide that you don’t want your country having a device that may as well be called “Warcrime Commiter 9000”. Does Avi Lewis support Canada having nuclear weapons? No? So he’s a tankie then, right? It just goes to show how far the Overton window has shifted right, and how people are shifting with it.

I want to know when being Canadian started meaning being anti-humanity. The creators of these weapons were horrified at their capability, and we decide that we want to have more of these things in the world over this fallacy that more destructive capability means more safety.

Yes, keep arming the world with doomsday weapons, great idea.

We signed a non-proliferation agreement for a reason.

I’m pre-HRT still, waiting until next month to start the readiness assessment when my doctor gets back from vacation, but I’ve stopped shaving my arms for a bit since the cat scratched me pretty good when we were playing not long ago, and I want to wait for those wounds to heal before starting again.

Seeing my hair grow back on my arms reminds me how much I hate body hair. I’m going to start waxing soon, and I’m really hoping that making a habit of that will help keep it away for longer.

Always hated looking at myself in the mirror, or in photos and videos either.

I know it’s supposed to be a dip, but I treat hummus like a condiment half the time.

Love it to the point I eat it straight.

Cool. So now we’re just making up imaginary scenarios as an excuse to subtly say slurs.

Moment I came out as trans, people in public chats I was in started thinking they had the right to just start talking about what was in my pants.

Just suddenly becoming some sort of sex object for people was annoying as hell. People rarely said that to me as a man, and yet suddenly it’s as casual for people to talk about it as it is for them to ask who’s on the other end of a phone call.

It’s absurdly common, and I hate that I’m just some fetish to men even when I’m not into them.

I don’t want to come off the wrong way, but growing up in an abusive household where sexual abuse was thankfully not around, I often felt, and still feel that people have that expectation of me not to say anything to prevent it from ruining the lives of everyone in the family.

I’ve had people with no relation to my family tell me things like “maybe your parents would have abused you less if you spent more time with them” or “maybe if they hit you more you’d show more respect”.

I’m trans, so different experience, but I wouldn’t be surprised if cis women also had to deal with comments like “well what did you do for him to do that to you?” in regards to domestic violence.

Oh cool, glad I abandoned them.

I don’t care about the benefits it brings. You’re basing your work off stolen, unattributed code.

Hacks.

Good to know you’re actively screwed if your parents disowned you.

The Golden Girls