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rford333.bsky.social
@rford333.bsky.social
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rford333.bsky.social
May 19, 2025 at 12:27 AM
rford333.bsky.social
May 19, 2025 at 12:26 AM
rford333.bsky.social
It was actually worse than that...
MoneyPuck's "Deserve To Win O'Meter" shows 78.7% to 21.3% in favour of Florida and a lot more 'home plate' scoring chances than the Leafs.
May 8, 2025 at 3:59 AM
rford333.bsky.social
I'm sure all the fans out there who always said this doesn't mean anything when the Leafs were on the other end of it are all still very much holding to that position...
The MoneyPuck "Deserve To Win O'Meter" shows Toronto at 21.3% and Florida at 78.7% and many more scoring chances in good position for Florida.
May 8, 2025 at 1:52 AM
rford333.bsky.social
Journalism 101: "If someone says it's raining outside & another person says it's dry, it's not your job to quote them both. You job is to look out the fucking window and find out which is true."
April 17, 2025 at 1:42 AM
rford333.bsky.social
April 14.

On top of *everything else* going on right now, you're throwing THIS SHIT at me, too, weather?!?

FML
A street beginning to be covered in snow, with snow flying thickly through the air.
April 14, 2025 at 4:32 PM
rford333.bsky.social
thewalrus.ca/common-sense...

Spot on. The neo-con playbook in a nutshell.
As services are squeezed and governments shift from universal to targeted programs, many come to view government as less relevant to their lives, there only for others, and they often become angry not just at government but also at those others. Austerity also undermines the already shallow trust in government. As medicare, the only universal program still standing in Canada, is underfunded and wait times lengthen and out-of-pocket costs grow, the notion that public provision is invariably inefficient is reinforced. Austerity is self-perpetuating. The reluctance to invest what’s needed in public programs means that those programs often disappoint, creating a vicious circle—underfunded programs don’t deliver the services we need, our trust in government’s ability to deliver is undermined, we become even more reluctant to pay the taxes necessary to make those programs better. What’s on offer is a bargain basement citizenship: don’t ask too much of government, and it won’t ask too much of you. And whatever government does ask of us, we increasingly resent. Austerity, more powerfully than any story people are told, makes evident that they need to look to themselves and away from society and the state. We are taxpayers and consumers who should want to pay as little tax as possible so we can consume as much as possible and make our own choices, free from obligations to the common good. We address societal and global issues, if at all, with individual solutions—give to charity, put a panel on the roof, buy an electric car if we can afford it—but we fight against higher taxes to pay for investments in welfare or renewable energy or infrastructure or better health care or ending chronic homelessness. Neoliberalism encourages a short-term, transactional approach to the world. By making government less relevant to our everyday lives, an instrument of control rather than public enterprise, we shouldn’t be surprised if the result is antipathy or apathy or a loss in the belief that we can do great things together or even that we are in this together. We lose interest in political parties, in politics. We vote every once in a while, if we so choose, and otherwise retreat to our private milieux. We see problems and solutions in individual terms, looking for people to blame for what we don’t like, and believing we are on our own or with our little platoons to deal with what the world throws at us. In this age of insecurity, attachment to democracy declines and vulnerability to demagogues grows.
March 16, 2025 at 4:31 PM
rford333.bsky.social
Yet another bomb from the GOAT, @juliusgoat.bsky.social
www.the-reframe.com/the-moon-is-...

A particularly astute observation I enjoyed - the implications apply equally to the state of our current party system here in Canada, FYI...
February 7, 2025 at 1:17 PM
rford333.bsky.social
Another in a long line of bangers from @juliusgoat.bsky.social

My favorite, and most surprising part of this piece outlining a framework for mitigating the psychological and material harms of the coming years:

www.the-reframe.com/demolishing-...
This means we need to spend significant time imagining what that good, sustainable, truthful, generative thing might be. When we think about what we'd like to put in the place of the Billionaire Scam, I think it is best for us to imagine the best world—one so good, in fact, that it seems impossible to us right now: A state of global peace so total that borders become meaningless; a state of provision for all so encompassing that money becomes useless; a state of human solidarity so total that instruments of death such as military and policing and prisons are distant memories; commitment to knowledge and human thriving so total that it is propaganda and misinformation and subjugation and exploitation that no longer even seem possible. Don't be afraid of utopias, in other words. Make that modification to your spirit. Have you ever noticed that, collectively speaking, we are afraid of utopias? We're told that what's best is not only impossible, but dangerous to seek, in a way that maintaining an actively collapsing world order isn't. Thus, those who seek the best are framed as dangerous. Thus, those who seek the worst are framed as safely realistic. I understand that utopia is a thing that is thought to be impossible with some reason. Perfection seems to be an abstract; in reality, there appear to be corruptions even to the most sustainable systems. I sure come short of perfection. But even if the goal is impossible, we'll get closer to it than if we keep our goal within the framework of what is considered possible—a framework currently governed and constrained entirely by the Billionaire Scam. And ... we might actually get there. Maybe we'll find that the best we can imagine right now isn't actually the unattainable ideal. Maybe, if we achieve the best we can imagine today, we'll discover we can imagine things still better, which seem impossible, but will be worthy goals all the same. And even if we never arrive at our imagined utopia, the act of imagination will transform our own individual spirit, and our individual spirit is part of the collective spirit, and changing the collective spirit is what changes the scope of what is possible. Imagining the best is one of the most foundational repairs there is: the repair of our conviction.
January 18, 2025 at 10:11 PM
rford333.bsky.social
It's not the most clever or witty, but there was never a moment in all the seasons of that show that made me laugh harder 😂
Homer Simpson at the dining room table with the caption, "right Lisa, a wonderful, magical animal."
January 12, 2025 at 2:53 PM
rford333.bsky.social
This is simultaneously unsurprising and infuriating.

I especially enjoyed this statement:
It’s time we asked many of the people who profited the most from Canada’s various crises – the climate, affordability, and housing crises, to name a few – to start financing solutions. Why shouldn’t real estate barons have to help finance a massive public housing construction program, and why shouldn’t fossil fuel magnates have to finance the transition to a green economy?
January 9, 2025 at 7:56 PM
rford333.bsky.social
January 6, 2025 at 1:54 AM
rford333.bsky.social
Fantastic as always.

This part, I thought, was particularly demonstrative of The Reframe's titular and characteristic ability to highlight what is (often conspicuously and intentionally) being left out of the conversation.
Was the death of Brian Thompson a crime? It was. The question that's not being asked in the halls of power and corridors of justice and in the platforms of influence is, *what type of crime was his life*? I think you write your obituary in life, not at the point of your death. Some people make their lives into something that causes millions to mourn, and as a result of that, the end of their lives causes people some relief from that morning, and relief rather naturally makes people celebrate. That's not something the celebrants are doing to the departed; it's something the departed did to all of them.
December 31, 2024 at 3:16 PM
rford333.bsky.social
I get a kick out of people who demand unequivocal proof before they'll change an opinion that was formed for them with absolutely no proof whatsoever.
December 28, 2024 at 10:24 PM
rford333.bsky.social
Amazing the way most of what we hear just parrots industry talking points. The rich really have mastered the art of getting the working class to work against their own interests.
December 28, 2024 at 6:38 PM
rford333.bsky.social
December 26, 2024 at 2:39 AM