Please Vote!!

Let's see if we can avoid our own Timbit Trump tomorrow!! If you're not sure of the best candidate to beat the cons in your riding, check out Smart Voting!  

Prime Minister Carney said of Poilievre yesterday, 

"It's easy to be negative when you've never fixed anything. It's easy to be negative when you've never built anything. It's easy to be negative when you're a career politician who has never accomplished anything." 

Taylor Noakes, agrees that Poilievre has accomplished nothing during his twenty years in Parliament:

"This isn't as much a political party as it is a ChatGPT-based slogan-generating algorithm speaking through the mouth of everyone's least favourite muppet. . . . The Conservatives have essentially made 'Fuck Trudeau' their ideology, and the average Conservative voter has made it their core identity. ... The Conservative Party have placed strict limits on who is allowed to ask him questions, and have further tried to prevent journalists from talking to party supporters and local candidates. ... According to a report by LaPress, Poilievre seems to have the loosest grasp on facts and the truth, as the publication found that he lied, embellished or misled far more than any of the other candidates during last week's debate. ... He has voted against the environment and climate 400 times ... against the Canadian Dental Care Plan, $10 a day daycare, the National School Food Program, the Canada Child Benefit, and raising the federal minimum wage ... against a proposed first-home savings account and a proposal to build four million new homes."

We can just look across the border to see what kind of nightmare we might end up with if Poilievre wins this election. Check out the far right's playbook, Project 2025, for all the possibilities. The most recent shocking event (and it's hard to chose which is worst) is deporting a 2-year-old US citizen with no meaningful process (here and here). Trump may have rigged the election last November, and I can only hope Poilievre's team isn't quite that organized. Possibly a more looming concern is that the tech bros may be the latest armageddon cult, except this one has immense power. 

And it can get so much worse! A couple weeks ago Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor wrote about "end times fascism": 

"Figures including Goff, Thiel and the investor and writer Balaji Srinivasan have been championing what they call 'exit' - the principle that those with means have the right to walk away from the obligations of citizenship, especially taxes and burdensome regulation. Retooling and rebranding the old ambitions and privileges of empires, they dream of splintering government and carving up the world into hyper-capitalist, democracy-free havens under the sole control of the supremely wealthy, protected by private mercenaries, serviced by AI robots and financed by cryptocurrencies. ... Their high-tech private domains are essentially fortressed escape pods, designed for the select few to take advantage of every possible luxury and opportunity for human optimization, giving them and their children an edge in an increasingly barbarous future. 

To put it bluntly, the most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating. ... These bunkers are brutal in their determination to expel and imprison unwanted humans (even if that requires indefinite confinement in extra-national penal colonies from Manus Island to Guantánamo Bay) and equally ruthless in their willingness to violently claim the land and resources (water, energy, critical minerals) they deem necessary to weather the coming shocks. ... The priority-pass corporate state and the mass-market bunker nation share a great deal in common with the Christian fundamentalist interpretation of the biblical Rapture, when the faithful will supposedly be lifted up to a golden city in heaven, while the damned are left to endure an apocalyptic final battle down here on earth. ...

It is terrifying in its wickedness, yes. But it also opens up powerful possibilities for resistance. To bet against the future on this scale - to bank on your bunker - is to betray, on the most basic level, our duties to one another, to the children we love, and to every other life form with whom we share a planetary home. This is a belief system that is genocidal at its core and treasonous to the wonder and beauty of this world. We are convinced that the more people understand the extent to which the right has succumbed to the Armageddon complex, the more they will be willing to fight back, realizing that absolutely everything is now on the line. ... We have reached a choice point ... instead of asking: 'Do we all share the same worldview?' Adrienne Maree urges us to ask: 'Is your heart beating and do you plan to live? Then come this way and we will figure out the rest on the other side.' To have a hope of combating the end times fascists, with their ever-constricting and asphyxiating concentric circles of 'ordered love', we will need to build an unruly open-hearted movement of the Earth-loving faithful: faithful to this planet, its people, it's creatures and to the possibility of a livable future for us all. Faithful to here." 

A couple days ago, Émile Torres came to a similar conclusion:

"41% of Americans expect that Jesus will either 'definitely' or 'probably' return by 2050. These eschatological convictions have had a significant impact on US foreign policy in the Middle East, since our current world, in this narrative, cannot end without a Jewish state in Palestine. Some scholars have dubbed this demographic the 'Armageddon Lobby'. Recent years have seen the emergence of a second and arguably more powerful 'Armageddon Lobby'. It resides in epicenters of power like Silicon Valley and embraces a 'secular' vision of humanity's grand future. ... Rushkoff calls this vision 'The Mindset' ... [who] claim that the world as we know it will soon expire. In its ashes, a new era dominated by digital lifeforms--that is, artificial intelligences--will emerge. ... As always, the narrative ends in some form of escape for those rich, smart, or singularly determined enough to take the leap. ... Elon Musk declared in an interview last year: 'Eventually the percent of intelligence that is biological will be less than 1% ... [it] can serve as a backstop, as a buffer.' ... The irony is that Musk isn't just claiming that AI will someday rule the world, but actively working to realize this future possibility."

Many of the proponents actively hope to upload their brains to live in "cyberimmortality," explaining that "digital life is the natural and desirable next step in cosmic evolution and that if we let digital minds be free rather than try to stop or enslave them, the outcome is almost certain to be good." It's the new and improved way to fight against accepting the reality of death and limits. But they also hope to be the creator of Gods -- the GOD of Gods, with AI deemed morally superior to nature: 

"If sacrificing all of humanity were the only way, and a reliable way, to get god-like things out there - superintelligences who still care about each other, who are still aware of the world and having fun - I would ultimately make that trade-off."  

"They would never have a 'bio baby' because as soon as you have a 'bio baby,' you get the 'mind virus' of the biological world. And when you have the mind virus, you become committed to your human baby. But it's much more important to be committed to the AI of the future. And so to have human babies is fundamentally unethical."

It's a "pro-extinctionist stance" that welcomes annihilation. Torres concludes,

"We should start thinking about these ideologies -- The Mindset, TESCREALism, or what journalist Gil Duran cleverly calls 'The Nerd Reich' -- as an existential threat no less serious than thermonuclear war. ... see companies like OpenAI as 'Agents of Doom' that are actively pushing us toward the precipice of destruction, driven by the quasi-religious conviction that our species has an expiration date and this date coincides with the superintelligent AIs. We should be trying to stop this from coming to pass with the urgency we would try to stop a killer asteroid from striking Earth. Why aren't we?"

Yikes, right?! So, get out and vote!!

And here's a random bunch of images from social media that are vaguely related and cluttering up my desktop: