This survey contains a list of taxes practiced around the world. Select all of the taxes you believe should be implemented, or continue to exist in the long term, in your country.
The gaming industry is among the final remaining industries to continue to give power to the consumer. One good game will last you forever. One can always hold out on a new game if it fails to meet expectations.
This results in the demand meeting the quality of the product, rather than social, economic and physical necessity of it.
However, consumer power is but one of the three necessary pillars in good business. The others are executive power and worker power. The prior is well-met, almost too well-met, whereas the former lacks the protections and leverage it needs to protect the industry’s jobs, and to stop the company from collapsing under its own weight.
This does not mesh well with the broad gaming community, which leans male, and therefore right-wing, and therefore much more in line with the interests of the executive over the interests of the worker. It obviously does not help, either, that many gamers are unemployed, further diminishing the sympathy said gamers could have with the working class in the gaming industry.
And as time goes on, the executive has bled the worker dry, and moves on to the next source of income. We have seen, at rates significantly higher than the once-expected norm, the prices of games, and the priority of gaming subscription services increase substantially. Nothing demonstrates this more than the recent push to replace physical games with digital games, which:
This is an extremely worrying trend that threatens the entire gaming industry, and it is a natural consequence of the irrational ask of infinite growth in a finite world. The reasonably equitable splitting of power in the gaming industry kept it afloat longer than most, but the executive has fallen into an utterly insane, accelerationist position that threatens the very system that gives them power. By pursuing immediate economic growth, they reach closer and closer to the peak of capital performance, in which all power lies with the executives, everything has been optimized to a tee, growth stops entirely, and the system collapses.
What I believe is necessary to see serious action to level the playing field once again. Stop these monopolistic business practices before it’s too late. Give power back to the workers, and stop companies issuing mass layoffs for short-term boosts. Consumers should vote with their wallets, rewarding good companies such as Larian, who pay and treat their workers well and create extremely high quality games, while punishing exploitative companies like EA, whose business model has been almost comically villainous, by refusing to buy their products.
Protect jobs, protect people, and protect the gaming industry.
It’s really a problem we see across every major party in the country but so many Canadians see American solutions for American problems as applicable to Canada. Some Liberals make a big fuss over gun violence even though there isn’t a significant gun violence problem in the country. Some Conservatives think we literally should be Americans and become a state.
Some New Democrats, on the other hand, seem to think that Canada is an imperialist, aggressive country whose military budget needs to be kneecapped.
Tell me, if that’s you: when’s the last time Canada kidnapped a foreign head of state? When’s the last time Canada started a war in West Asia? When’s the last time Canada said that an “entire society will die tonight”? Spoiler alert, it’s never. Why? Because we are a middle power that isn’t governed by self-destructive racists.
We are not the USA, we are Canada, stop acting like our military is a problem. Our military is closely tied to the USA, and it is that leverage in USA military actions that allow us to stop the Americans, on a micro scale, from bombing their way out of every problem. With a kneecapped military, that means more decisions being made without Canadian presence and more American dominance over the entire world.
In the original seasons of “The Simpsons”, the Simpsons’ next-door neighbour, Ned Flanders, was a character explicitly designed to be the antithesis of everything Homer Simpson is. Both men are fathers and husbands who genuinely care about their family and community in their own way, but there the similarities end. Homer is a drunk, he’s incompetent, he physically abuses his son. Ned Flanders is clean, decent and takes very good care of his sons. The Flanders always existed to serve as a direct contrast to the Simpsons; the Simpsons were the dysfunctional family, the Flanders were perfect.
However, as the show progressed, less and less emphasis was placed on the dichotomy between Ned Flanders and Homer Simpson, and the pair went from two sides of the same coin, to being two entirely different characters that serve entirely different purposes: Homer remaining as the main protagonist of The Simpsons, and Ned Flanders leaning into a previously secondary aspect of his character: his Christianity. Ned was originally characterized as a typical good Christian, and his actions reflected this, often showing much more Christ-like behaviour than anyone else in town, including the Reverend. This personality of the “good Christian”, however, was slowly shrunk into just “Christian”, and even further to just “the Bible-thumper”. Ned Flanders’ character was engulfed by a small part of his previous identity, and what remains contains very little depth.
This process is called Flanderization: when one or two of a character’s core traits are oversimplified, exaggerated and manipulated to fully change the character into a non-specific caricature. Ned Flanders once served an incredibly important role in the story of The Simpsons, a direct “Straight Man” contrast to the shenanigans of the main characters. But in the modern Simpsons era, Ned Flanders is just another character, filling the role whenever the show wants to make fun of evangelical Christians.
I fear that the same is happening to politics: the broad left and the broad right have laid claim to certain positions, and any deviation from the expected consensus is seen as “centrism”.
Consider for instance the case of GOP congressman Thomas Massie, a man who I consider to be to the right of the majority of the Republican Party. Unlike other far-right Republicans, though, his conservatism comes from principle rather than blind loyalty. Massie believes in small government, low spending, low taxes and government transparency, and his voting record tends to reflect this. However, simply due to his refusal to do whatever Trump wants him to do, he has been incorrectly branded as a “moderate” by many people.
Massie is not a person I like, at all — but he does hold genuine beliefs, which is not to be said about most people in the Republican Party, or even politics in general. This kind of particularist view of politics is something I believe we need more of.
Instead, we have politicians who just believe what is expected of them, and what is currently convenient for their political career. And to hold onto their base, politicians must make their actual policy positions vague while generally standing into a commedia dell’arte-style role: technocratic liberal, faith and flag conservative, progressive firebrand, economy-minded lib-con, the green party. Any outsider can take a quick look at the masks worn by the leaders and know what team they’re rooting for.
This is a huge problem because politics is not something that can afford to be simplified down to this level of generic-ness. In my opinion, politics is the single most important thing in the world, and every voter must be making rational decisions with their vote instead of selecting the person with whom they share a political tribe.
The solution is not something I can provide, but this is a problem that cannot be ignored. If we continue down the path of distinct ideologies going down the same road as Ned Flanders, we risk creating a politics that is so divisive, so tribal and so far gone from democratic principles that the entire system will collapse.
I’m a pragmatic cultural progressive. I believe in a generally free-market economy guided by independent and strong executive, worker and consumer powers, in breaking up monopolies and creating as much competition as possible, in nationalizing industries that break the social contract. I am a Canadian civic nationalist and oppose all forms of authoritarianism. I’m a Republican (as in, an anti-monarchist) and a federalist. I support electoral reform, a Green New Deal, free, accessible and quality healthcare, a welfare state and the Nordic Model. I believe in progressive taxes like LVT, a low wealth tax and inheritance tax, as well as regressive taxes like VAT and sales tax. I believe that the World Happiness Report is the single most important metric for measuring a nation’s success.
Calling myself a social democrat is correct, and I will continue to do so, but it is incredibly important that the conversation does not end there.
Don’t let yourselves be Flanderized.
If you want to abolish it, go ahead. It doesn’t really serve a serious purpose, and if Canada were established today, the chances of a Senate in any way similar to the current one being established are next to zero.
If you want to reform it, maybe, sure. Make the seats more proportional to the populations. Give individuals more power. Go ahead.
But a democratic senate is a TERRIBLE idea.
Canada is de facto a unicameral state. Turning it into a bicameral state, still with powerful federalism, would create so many roadblocks that progress, in any direction, is impossible. Politicizing the Senate is a very bad idea and would make the House of Commons, *the people’s house*, significantly weaker.
I personally believe that the strongest democracies are unicameral and federalist states with proportional representation. A democratic senate would be a step back from this ideal.
The man’s a straight up supervillain lmfao
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