AGM

u/AGM@lemmy.ca
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It's not going to overthrow a government, but it's also not just dance. They explicitly include a bunch of political messages. They've had whole songs and sections of shows dedicated to the idea if overthrowing China’s government and promoting a particular political worldview, not to mention the anti-atheism and anti-evolution stuff. It's a bit like if Scientologists had more of a political movement to them and went around doing Broadway songs with anti-psychiatry, pro-Xenu, overthrow x government lyrics. Of course, they're free to believe whatever they want, and I'm not calling for them to be cancelled, but they have also received state support for a long time because of alignment with US interests and the point is to influence public beliefs, so they basically are a propaganda dance troupe that's part of a larger influence effort also working on other fronts.

Falun Gong is headquartered in the US. They are the cult behind Shen Yun. They're also behind the Epoch Times. They have an explicitly anti-China political agenda aimed at the overthrow of China's government that they work to promote through both. It's also pretty notable that Friends of Falun Gong, which has given financial support to them over the years, is an organization conspicuously founded by one of the co-founders of the US's National Endowment for Democracy, and they get diplomatic support from the US because of their political agendas. Not that they have gone without issue in the US either though, as in 2024 the CFO of Epoch Times, the news influence arm that complements Shen Yun's cultural influence arm, was indicted by the DOJ for coordinating a large international money laundering scheme and pled guilty to it just recently.

So, they actually basically are a shady foreign influence group with a political agenda from outside Canada.

The issue is the rush to build driving acceptance of designs that are wasteful. Building for efficiency is the real solution, but that takes time none of the people putting money into this want to spend waiting for things to be done right. Same reason you won't see them being built in the far North; existing access to energy and data transmission infrastructure and available labour to get things done in a hurry are what wins out.

Most Canadians basically have their net worth in their homes and many treat their homes as their retirement plan. An economy with a solved housing crisis is an economy with a much lower competitive demand for housing, which naturally means lower housing prices, which means most voters in the country seeing their net worth go down and their retirement expectations negatively affected. So, there's a petty strong incentive to pay lip service to solving the crisis, but a very strong disincentive for actually solving it.

The only thing I might disagree with is this being a consequence of Carney. Carney is a big part of it, but this move to the right is not just a Carney thing, or even just a Liberal Party thing. There are also Conservatives who feel betrayed by their party for moving too far to the right. It's a substantial move to the right across over 90% of our elected representatives. The shift is bigger and worse than just being a Carney thing.

Carney's not that rich now. He has a long way to go before joining the 9-figure club. Assuming Brookfield’s BGTF I does well, he will be much richer when the fund matures in the 2030's. Who knows, maybe he'll join that club then. The fact that we don't have any idea how much richer he could be made by that fund is kind of nuts to me, but for now he's still a long, long way off of nine figures and is only around 1% of the way to being a billionaire.

Stirring up nationalist sentiments with the idea of an outside threat to make yourself the national champion and having a populace rally behind you with their political support as they huddle under the flag is incredibly powerful in electoral politics, but politics for the public and politics behind closed doors with powerful stakeholders are never the same.

It's not altogether unlike Reddit, but that's also kind of the point I guess, being Reddit-like without the centralized platform ownership model. Also, smaller and slower community with probably better moderation. Still, anywhere with people on the internet is going to have people on the internet issues.

Yeah, it's kind of strange that after having been called out many times the account persists, but it's one of the most frequent posters in lemmy.ca. You'll probably also come across accounts like Hotznplotzn or randomname at some point and immediately recognize the similarity, but totally understandable not to see it at first.

Looks like it's being funded by TMC, so taxpayers again. The private partner is being brought in for their "expertise." No doubt they'll be well compensated for expertise, especially as there's obviously no alternative source of expertise available, especially not with a TMC in the lead after they built TMX.